Literature
The Invisible
Freight ships had a nasty habit of shedding off material shortly after lift-off. Extra pounds of height-resistant plating that were worn-out and ready to detach, straps and buckles of towing equipment that hadn’t been tied down properly, and the accumulation of dirt and grime that built up on a long stay of any planet, all these were scraped off during a rapid ascent and floated away helplessly in a ship’s wake, to no concern of anyone but any smaller ships that might be directly behind it.
If enough of these freight ships lifted off regularly from a planet, they’d leave their mark across space: a line of trash, like resid