April 14th, 1961: NASA publishes a list of satellites and space probes orbiting the Earth, Moon, and Sun, and it all fits on a single, ordinary, typed sheet of letter-sized paper. Twenty-six in all.
Just take a moment to marvel at that.
Now, of course, we (as in humans, not the physics shop) are still sending scads of objects into space, and NASA maintains the ARES Orbital Debris Program to keep track of all the crap up there.
Remember: wishing upon the burning reentry of space debris is just as good as on the remnants of comet dust!