Most of today’s space economy occupies low Earth orbit, a 1,200-mile-wide band that’s a slice of less than one one-thousandth of the Gravity Well. (Wikipedia has current information on satellites in LEO, MEO, and GEO.)
It really wasn’t that long ago when the two greatest superpowers were vying to put satellites into space. Now, 50 nations have their own satellites in low Earth orbit. If you’re a Thailand, say, you can call Space Systems/Loral, a Canadian-owned company based in Palo Alto, California, and tell them you want to put a satellite into geostationary orbit for television broadcasting or military communications. You can have the thing in orbit 25,000 miles above Earth within two years.
