Tracked orbital debris objects

Between 2010 and 2022, the price of a pint of lager in the UK and the number of tracked orbital debris objects both increased steadily, correlating at 0.9659. The reading that space junk is somehow inflating British beer prices has the energy of a conspiracy theory that people would actually enjoy believing. A more honest reading is that inflation affects everything on Earth and entropy affects everything above it, and the two processes happen to operate on similar timescales. The pint gets more expensive. The orbit gets more cluttered. Neither trend shows any sign of reversing, and both inspire the same resigned sigh.

UK pint prices rose from roughly £3.00 in 2010 to over £4.50 by 2022, driven by general inflation, excise duty increases, rising input costs, and the consolidation of the pub industry. Tracked orbital debris grew from approximately 16,000 to over 30,000 objects as satellite launch rates increased and fragmentation events added to the debris population. Both are monotonically increasing series across the same 11-year window, driven by entirely unrelated economic and physical processes.

Inflation on Earth and accumulation in orbit will always correlate over any shared time window because both only go in one direction. The r-value is describing the arrow of time, not a relationship between beer and space debris.