I really don't see how this is an outrage article. The concern about waste is a little exaggerated, but warranted. LEO is getting cluttered to the point that India, China and the US are taking steps to do something. A brief bout of antisatellite warefare could render LEO dangerous to unusable. Doesn't matter how pristine outer space is if we can't get out of orbit.

The amount of debris on Mars being "only" a few cars worth, but the point is we aren't even there yet. Of course I wouldn't have expected NASA to arrange to bring it home, and I suspect when we actually get there, the trash will be recycled at some point and the probes enshrined in a museum. But we need to make sure we consider our trash being left around unacceptable.

I think the concern about contamination is very real in the search for life. As the population on Mars grows, that search will wind down. Certainly once the first children are born. They contaminate everything .

Yes. Space is huge. We aren't going to trash it to bad to fast. But then again, the wise in my childhood claimed protection of the atmosphere wasn't needed, it was to big for us to impact, as was the ocean. But now, 50 years and 4 billion more people later, we know differently. We will be lucky to stumble around between Earth and Moon (maybe Mars) in my or your life time. We need to make sure we don't leave a mess for future space travelers to complain about. If a paint chip can do the damage it does at low speed, hitting a discarded 2024 rocket booster at .5 C is going to hurt.

We need to establish the mentality of recycling, efficiency, and cleaning up after ourselves from day one of our journey to the stars. Easier to establish it now than when we have 1,000,000 people living off world. We have a long way to go before we reach the point of unlimited resources and energy promised in sci-fi. Let's act like it.