Not being particularly knowledgeable about aeronautics or astrophysics, I’m not entirely sure. My guess would be that in order to do something like you propose, you would need to blow up something very, very big, so that it would create a ton of debris to ensure that the majority of artificial satellites got damaged. As far as making it impossible to launch spacecraft, even if you could put that much debris in orbit, most of it would fall and burn up in the atmosphere eventually. That said, I believe existing space junk is a problem, so much so that NASA tracks known pieces of junk.

Maybe mattchew can comment. He knows more about space.

The question still arises as to whether destruction of the means of the production of the first instance of an emerging technology results in uninvention: if others are aware of the “uninvented” technology and have sufficient resources/motivation they can perform reverse engineering- or come up with alternate methods of achieving the same goal.

I’ve only read the abstract, but this paper
http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/klu/jott/2002/00000027/00000003/05087992
seems to argue “failure to preserve tacit knowledge could lead to uninvention”

Elisa, to phrase your response in 203speak (forgive me), you are saying that the loss of the Chinese navy was due to arbitrary, non-deterministic forces, right? It was just a twist of fate, and if this was Sliders, we could just jump to a continuity in which Nelson was crushed by a Chinese armada and the Brits still made terrible grey bland food except out of rice. I wish I had a copy of Guns/Germs/Steel on me, because I think Diamond had some determinisitic explanation. He would be a geographical determinist, I guess…

Running a similar fleet was a very expensive business, and Zheng He’s voyages, however incredible and exotic, didn’t bring back to the court (that was footing the bill) anything that was deemed worthy of the investment needed. A series of circumstances (Zheng He’s death, a new emperor, military threats from the inland that required that the army be given preference over the navy when deciding how to spend money) drew the court’s attention away from the fleet, and since nobody else could invest in such an expensive and rather extravagant enterprise, the ships began to be abandoned and to decay. Later on, when China had already lost her maritime supremacy, a new, extremely conservative group of bureaucrats had all the remaining ocean-faring ships burnt. I don’t know, though, if they were still in use at the time (I am sure they were not used for transoceanic voyages, and suspect that they were too bulky and expensive for coast sailing), and whether the blueprints were also destroyed or just happened to get destroyed (or lost!) later - the only thing I’m sure of is that nobody knows for sure how these ships looked, how they were built, how many people manned them, etc. I wouldn’t say that there was an active decision to ‘forget’ the technology, though - rather a combination of political and economical factors let to the loss of importance of that particular technology.