Target practice will only work if you aren't producing debris.
Most satellites' orbit is due to degrade at some point, unless they're self-mobile.
This is one more example of the limitations imposed by the single biggest barrier in space development - the cost of getting mass out of the Earth's gravity and into orbit. Without this barrier we'd probably have some sort of space janitors in place to clean up the huge amount of debris already up there.
The best way to beat the cost of getting up our gravity well will be either an increase in production of rockets (mass production = costs drop) if rocket tech stays the same, or an increase in profits again if rocket tech stays still. Considering the profits floating in space for anyone to capitalize on, e.g. raw materials in the asteroid belt (something like a dozen earth's worth), it's just a matter of a few pioneers breaking the dam and getting things moving. In the case of materials like those, it's also a way to relieve the strip mining of the planet.
It's looking more and more like those pioneers will have be private and/or commercial rather than public like NASA, because too few people would support NASA even though it is getting bread crumbs of the budget.
This is a shame because outer space is the exact same as America used to be, "Terra Incognita". And we know how that piece of unknown land turned out to be.
