Although the number of large artificial satellites orbiting the Earth is small compared to the number of small pieces of debris in orbit, the large satellites interfere more seriously with telescope observations because of the strong reflections they produce  Because many of those large satellites have ceased to function, the proposal has recently been made to eliminate interference from nonfunctioning satellites by exploding them in space
This proposal, however, is ill conceived, since
for satellites that have ceased to function, repairing them while they are in orbit would be prohibitively expensive