There's definitely SOMEthing up there, but you're right that there's been this propaganda that nearly all communications that go "around" the world, it's done via satellite.
I found to my surprise that this is entirely untrue, that most data traffic goes around the world via these gigantic undersea cables. There's simply not enough bandwidth up there to do much more.
I also found that NASA (and presumably others) often send satellites up suspended on these helium balloons. NASA is the world's largest consumer of helium.
There are also question one has about how if there's allegedly these tens of thousands of things up there, all this "space junk", per this illustration from the Smithsonian, how is it that we never see it from footage of ISS, or that rockets going up into space never hit this junk?
At the rates at which IIS or the Space Shuttle are travelling, allegedly, at about 17,000 MPH, a tiny fragment of metal the size of a pea could explose the entire thing. But it never happens. There's no way we have the tech not only to track but to plot trajectories and orbits to avoid every little bit of this trash. You might say that, well, we have regulations about where we can put this stuff, but I doubt that Russia, China, and the others are going to abide by whatever standards those are, and you hear of stuff that begins to die where their orbits began to decay, and they're breaking up little bit little every step of the way down.
But, I agree with you ... we've heard a lot of propaganda, but I've never seen any of these types of questions answered in any kind of sufficient detail.
Topic: Are there space satellites? (Read 4380 times)