"America's space monopoly?" I thought the Russians had more satellites in orbit, and most of them were for military purposes. What's more, even before the Columbia tragedy, they were able to get a Soyuz spacecraft off the ground more often than we could launch a space shuttle.
According to this article, Russia has only 96 total satellites of which 40 are purely military and 18 are dual use. They once had 186 satellites. Many of their remaining satellites are beyond their designed life span.
I'm guessing that we have many times this number of satellites. IIRC the GPS system alone has 24 satellites. The article includes the following quote from a Russian general: “Only one Russian satellite is currently over the continental United States compared to 12 or 13 U.S. spy satellites, which are constantly monitoring Russia,”