Okay, here we go. I may be the only commenter so far who managed to understand the game, let's talk about it.
The biggest problem with the game is its clunkiness. You can't earn distance until you click at least twice with very few indicators to tell you what to do in-game. Yes, you can multi-select, but that not only seems to be a nearly useless feature (I think you can use it to mass-heal satellites, but every time I tried I couldn't do anything with them), it also prevents you from doing things you want to do, like set up rockets to send to the launchers. Also, the upgrade menu auto-closes as soon as you choose one, meaning if you want to max anything out, that's a minimum of 6 clicks per feature.
The next issue is difficulty. To earn enough money to buy more satellites, you have to hit temporary targets using rapidly-spinning launchers, the slightest wrong timing and you'll earn about 40km. Even the seeker rockets need to be relatively close or you end up losing half of the value of the rocket in the first place.
Tied to that is deterioration and issues with spawning. You can easily be sitting at max zoom for minutes without a single target spawning. I went an entire run (5+ invasions) with no asteroids appearing. Also, your satellites may well break well before the next one appears - an exclamation mark is not descriptive enough to explain what's happening. If this was a hammer, that would communicate much more clearly what's happening.
Now the infinite issues. As it turns out, the medi-kit satellites keep themselves topped up on health, as well as whatever satellites are close enough in orbit. Seemingly, this also prevents those satellites being healed from dying at all. I had set up a single healer with 10+ poor defense units and I had to quit out because an hour later nothing was getting through or dying. The scaling on the enemies isn't enough for an arcade-style game, they should have been speeding up or getting more health as well. (Also, healers shouldn't heal themselves and you should be able to delete satellites regardless)
How I got the cog in the end was building up to 800+km, buying one healer and 4 poor defense units, and leaving it alone. I think it died in the 5th invasion. Really, the cog should have proc'd as soon as the third invasion was over, but that didn't happen to me.
This is a nice idea, with promise, but attention needed in a lot of areas. This feels like a case study in why you have to get someone not involved in development playtesting the game - so you can see where people are struggling and focus on that rather than adding new features. The time spent on implementing the ability to mine asteroids, for example, could have been spent on making targets way more frequent (think a new one appearing every 10 seconds) and giving base rockets a slight homing effect. The result would've been a game with less 'stuff' but instantly much more engaging and fun.
I hope this has been helpful, I'm not trying to be mean in any way so I apologise if I've come across that way. I'm just trying to help you understand why nobody seems to be able to 'get' your game.
Metagame cog 92/126 (but didn't seem to proc, even on death)