> If your receiver is so sensitive it's intolerant of stray EMI from a circuit board in outer space, there's no reasonable way to adapt to that

They also mentioned detecting narrowband transmissions from a commercial FM station, 300km from the radio observatory that reflected off the satellite.

Which, like, cool that they can detect that, but you completely lost me if want to ban all metallic objects in earth orbit.

That was the original type of communication satellite—the passive metal balloon,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Echo ("Project Echo" (1960-69))

(Here's a historic irony: the field of radio astronomy was founded by people doing this stuff. The cosmic microwave background was discovered, by accident, with an RF horn built for this satellite relay experiment).

(Here's another weird one:)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_West_Ford ("Project West Ford" (1961-63)) ("The goal of the project was to place a ring of 480,000,000 copper dipole antennas in orbit to facilitate global radio communication")

Just send up a satellite that uses solar power to spew out sticky dust to cover everything metallic. The dust would be fairly efficient, as it would continue to orbit and stick to things over time.

Yes, this could cause problems, like loss of GPS, weather prediction and other scientific equipment, and enemies wouldn’t be able to keep an eye on each other as easily, leading to wars. But, maybe light pollution would be less annoying.