To get a better sense of the scale, if you are viewing this app on a 4K display, with the planet measuring about 2,000 pixels across Earth’s diameter is approximately 12,742 km (7,918 miles), so each pixel represents about 6.37 km (3.96 miles).
A Starlink satellite is roughly 6 m (20 ft) wide without its solar panels. This means a one-pixel satellite marker is shown at roughly 1,000 times its true size. So even if this image already looks extremely crowded, the dots are still massively exaggerated. Visually, there would be roughly another factor of 1,000 before the satellites themselves were shown at their true scale—although this does not mean that orbit could easily accommodate 1,000 times more satellites but I guess there is still some space in space.
There's already so many starlinks in some bits of LEO that a single sat breaking up will lead to a runaway chain reaction that breaks up everything in that orbit quicker than the debris will decay out of it:
> The results indicate the current population of intact objects exceeds the unstable threshold at all altitudes between 400 km and 1000 km and the runaway threshold at nearly all altitudes between 520 km and 1000 km.
Whether the pixels are not representative of actual size, seems like putting lipstick on a pig. When I look up at night, I can't see the night sky without several satellites interrupting my view. Even a brief 10 second glance, will produce at least 1.
Their is no communication need that is greater than our need to understand space and space weather. If the satellite operators can't stop destroying the night sky, their launch permission should be removed, so as their old satellites fall, new ones won't be allowed to launch.
Further, if the federal government won't intervene (looking at the U.S. because Starlink). Then states should make those satellite receivers illegal.
I'm sometimes baffled how people's knee jerk reaction is to think how to ban this. And yet those same people complain about their parents that claimed that Rock'n'Roll or DnD should be banned because it's satanic.
This is literally the coolest thing we as a species achieved that doesn't serve self-preservation purposes.
I don't like that either, but nothing's stopping others from following the same path and achieving the same capabilities, other than their own inability or refusal to do what's already been done. It's been over a decade since Falcon 9's first successful landing and we're only recently starting to see similar feats from others.
Except the space in these orbits is finite and a collision at say 520 km requires quick action or the entire fleet in that orbit will eventually be destroyed.
There are numerous other EU satellite comms providers, though most are aimed at commercial/broadcast services. That's a departure point for satellite-phone or satellite-internet, however.
Europe can and has developed similar and/or precursor capabilities.
The EU can technically do it but they won’t. Starlink dwarfs all the services you mentioned. The EU doesn’t even believe in air conditioning much less making a robust satellite network
We shot thousands of tiny cubes into a heights people thought heaven would reside. Then we communicate with them at the speeds of "The whole data storage of 2000's computer" per second. They survive radiation, accelerations and flying through electromagnetic field at thousands of km/h. We can predict their movement, steer them and provide consumer priced service for tens of thousands of people. It's astronomy, mechanical, material, electrical and computer engineering at it's peak.
This is a civilization level defining achievement.
It was never "legal" but it wasn't specifically illegal either.
Space-based businesses are hoping to grandfather themselves in once laws are established about the use of space, and betting that by then whatever service they offer will be seen as indispensable.
In the last ten years we have one (1) accidental satellite collision. In 2021 when a Chinese spy satellite in a 788km orbit collided with an old rocket stage from the 90s. There was also that Indian anti-satellite weapon hitting a microsat in 2019, but that was very much intentional (and much condemned because of all the fragments it caused)
In the decade before that (so 2006-2015) we had four accidental collisions and two anti-satellite tests (China and US)
Those are not frequent events. And if you attribute any statistical significance to them, it seems we are getting much better at avoiding collisions
Respectfully disagree as you're comparing the surface to the size of the object, so it definitely matters.
Here's some math:
Average Earth diameter: 12742kms + 10km
Average airplane surface area = 500m2
12752^2*pi = 510,865,389km2
Surface flight/plane = 1021730 planes
Starlink orbit height = ~500km
Surface at orbit = ~551,712,377 so ~8% increase (which is non-negligible)
Average Starlink satellite surface area = ~7m2
Surface LEO/satelite = 78816053 satellites (77x compared to airplanes)
Daily flights 50k-100k. Total number of satellites <20k.
And this is only for Starlink LEO. If you go for higher orbits the surface grows substantially. Also satellites have predictable paths, altitudes, airplanes maneuver and turn, gain altitude/lose altitude. They gather around points (airfields) etc...
I would argue that 8% is absolutely negligible; however one thing that isn't is that airspace is a narrow band vertically (12 km? Not sure exactly), while LEO is about 800 km thick (from about 200 km, because the Kármán line isn't good enough, to about 1000 km).
Conversely:
> Daily flights 50k-100k. Total number of satellites <20k.
Those 20k satellites orbit roughly every 95 minutes, so they're doing ~15 orbits per day, and even the longest flights from conventional aircraft are about half that distance, so by distance each satellite in LEO is doing strictly more than the equivalent of 30 flights per day each.
Research I'm doing for a blog post has shown me that the exact position of a satellite is surprisingly variable compared to what you'd reasonably expect from a "Newtonian spherical Earth with a perfect vacuum" approximation of the orbits, enough so that it makes sense to treat 1 km as the "collision avoidance manoeuvres needed" threshold.
Airplanes are much more likely to collide, but they don't dump hyperspeed shrapnel into the airspace that persists for months or years when they do. It makes sense to be extremely paranoid about satellite collisions.
Yes, I agree! But a 10% increase in surface area of LEO isn't small when compared to the size of the satellite, taking into account how the surface area at 10km compares to airplanes.
10% is an outrageously large change in a normal loan interest rate and an irrelevant change when comparing the weight of a paper plane to a real one. Keeping in mind another factor in your comparison was 7700%, I'm inclined to agree the 10% is negligible in context. It's fun to think about though.
But 10% is 50 million square kilometers. If we project this surface area to a theoretical planet with a diameter of 2000kms this planet alone would support 2000+ Starlink satellites in LEO. This is again not negligible.
There are all sorts of such scenarios beyond the one being discussed where it's a relevant amount. This is true of most any measure or metric and why the context that we're talking about the skies of Earth compared to the LEO of Earth is key. Once you remove that context and start comparing against other things you can any difference insignificant or critically massive by choice.
Why would it be illegal? There are virtually zero drawbacks and huge advantages to these satellites. They are not rendered to scale either, in reality they are minuscule compared to the amount of available space. There’s room for millions more spacecraft.
I think it's fair to classify the advantages as "modest" not "huge." Yes, it's cool that sailboats in the middle of the Pacific can get Internet, but the vast majority of Internet users are still connected via fiber or copper. And, arguably, the existence of Starlink could enable governments to cease the rollout of terrestrial Internet, which is a modest drawback to the technology.
I've also seen reports that, as the satellites become overburdened, speeds are pretty variable. Again, not saying it's a net negative, but I just don't think there are "huge advantages" to Starlink.
As someone who worked and briefly lived in subsaharan Africa, I will say that the advantages are huge. Bandwidth alone isn't even the whole story - latency really matters too, another area where Starlink is super helpful compared to say, trying to get fiber punched in west from the southeastern parts of Africa. I have not yet mentioned the benefits of state actors not being able to cut your fiber at sea where nobody can see them.
From the community guidelines: Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously
I'd add to your list...Or do Khan Academy, learn how to purify water, find out recent grain prices a 10 hour drive away, decide if your baby's rash needs an expensive trip in to town, and so on.
What a delusional view of reality. Do you think those who live in areas with zero fixed internet infra has the time nor the resources to sit through a few hours of Khan Academy per day, or the means to build a filter capable of purifying water?
This is a pretty uncharitable take. Every largish construction company in the country uses StarLink for their many projects where Internet isn't available. Yknow, actually building the country out. It's a game changer.
I’m thinking buying a camper van, and just travel through the world. Except I need internet, everywhere.
There are no such options. Starlink is the best, but there are two main problems with it:
- In the countries where it would be the most useful, it’s not allowed to be used (Garmin has the same problem with their Fenix 8 Pro, their availability maps are a joke)
- You need to go back to your “home” country every other month (there is a non legal, thus risky, option to circumvent this for now)
There are huge military advantages right now. The US military will not willingly give up starlink, and they can use it in every country without permission.
I’m more familiar with how Starlink compares to existing publicly-available satellite internet options. Here are some brief points:
- data throughput orders of magnitude higher,
- the ability to use smaller and more portable antennas (e.g. ~100 Mbps with something the size of a textbook, currently ~2 Mbps and soon ~10s Mbps with your normal mobile phone),
- order of magnitude lower latency compared to GSO satellites.
Other constellations like Iridium dedicate large portions to use by government(s?), too, but simply do not have the throughput or total bandwidth that Starlink does. Your speeds there, on the expensive business plans that offer it, are measured in the low Kbps.
'Secret military documents from clandestine forums between Russia and China have revealed a possible joint strategic plan to disable Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite network alongside a deep weapons development partnership spanning hypersonic missile defense and autonomous drones, The Insider reported on July 9.'
Just thinking out loud: given that we know positions of these satellites, is one able to use it for non-gps navigation? Either by using vision - by tracking or by using some electromagnetic specter - listening to satellites...
Sure, if you're able to accurately determine angles between the Earth's tangent at your location and the satellites. That's how you'd navigate using the sun, moon and stars. I suspect those natural celestial bodies are much less of a hassle than man-made satellites.
This contrasts greatly with actual GNSS – the whole point of GPS and the others is that you don't need to determine those angles. The only thing you need to determine is the signal delay (i.e. distance) from a few satellites. That's a lot more convenient.
Not an expert but I imagine the problem with using vision is the problem of angular error propagation. That is the angle-> distance error problem:
linear error≈Rtan(Δθ)≈RΔθ
Here linear error is the error in position, R is the distance from the observer to the target and θ is the angle error. You would need incredibly good optics and resolution to minimise angular error and thus linear error.
Given the large R (Even starlink satellites are far away compared to positional accuracy needed) and probably pretty large angular error, your still talking error of kilometres, though with good optics you may be able to get this down to hundreds of meters. The other problem is knowing the position isn't trivial, since their position drifts relative to predicted and isn't known very precisely.
There is also the problem that as R shrinks, speed increases relative to you.
Not impossible but it's not as easy as dedicated GNSS satellites. The ranging codes in a GNSS signal are what makes it easy to find your distance from the transmitter. Starlink doesn't have that, there are some observables you could use but it's not simple.
I just released a new update to mine yesterday with ranges and the ability to make a story of multiple saved scenes. Then they can be played back at a presentation later.
If you zoom in you can see them moving. Click on them to see their tracks. I'm surprised how random the orbits seem. It's too cloudy at the moment but maybe on a clear night I can check the accuracy by looking up.
That’s a good point. I understand why satellite.love stands out in terms of atmosphere—it’s the app I’d leave running in the background. Satellite Tracker 3D seems more straightforward when I want to take a closer look at a specific object, while satellitemap.space offers the most comprehensive features once you get used to its somewhat cluttered user interface. So I don’t think there’s a clear winner; each of these apps is optimized for atmosphere, user-friendliness, and data depth, respectively.
Nice site, but I'm really missing any altitude reference for the satellites. It's hard to use any satellite tracker with any degree of utility other than as a toy website when it's exceedingly difficult to determine and compare basic altitude information across different satellites.
Half a year ago, I captured a photograph of a long train of satellites. However, when I navigate to that location using this tool, I don’t see any satellite train present at that specific timestamp.
I wonder if there are other satellites not included in this dataset, or if I should search way further from the location on the map
A lot of the trackers miss the trains because trains occur within the first few orbits after a launch. So if they don’t start recording data until some delayed event, they miss it. I had this problem a lot with live night sky trackers not showing the trains despite me seeing them quite clearly.
Yeah if the lower 48 states (~2800 miles) span the width of my entire screen (2560px), each pixel represents just over a mile. The satellites at that level were rendered with dots that are ~3px or just over 3 miles/.1% of that width.
The Starlink v2 is 100ft on it's longest dimension. This means that the actual size of the satellite relative to the dot is on the same order of magnitude (.6%) as the dot is to the size of the US when it takes up my entire screen.
Why are there demarcations towards the poles where the satellite density drops off? Seems Norway, Sweden and Finland have a much lower density of satellites .
In order to cover those northern/southern extremes, more expensive high inclination orbits are required (in the US these are launched from California). They are more expensive because you’re no longer getting the rotational velocity of the earth for free in your orbital velocity.
So for a LEO constellation you want to minimize the launches to high inclinations and keep the bulk in those juicy easterly ones.
Populations are also far lower than at lower latitudes.
This affects both commercial potential (fewer possible subscribers) and bandwidth congestion (dittos). For both you'd want fewer birds in those orbits, and orbital dynamics only strengthen the argument.
Generally orbits are predicted many circumnavigations out, with manoeuvres being necessary to handle crossing paths and orbital decay from atmospheric drag.
its not the most intuitive setup but theres a lot of info available.
click on a dot and it will show up on a list to top left, click on an item in that list and you get a flyout menu to the top left with a bunch of data regarding the satellite.
To get a better sense of the scale, if you are viewing this app on a 4K display, with the planet measuring about 2,000 pixels across Earth’s diameter is approximately 12,742 km (7,918 miles), so each pixel represents about 6.37 km (3.96 miles).
A Starlink satellite is roughly 6 m (20 ft) wide without its solar panels. This means a one-pixel satellite marker is shown at roughly 1,000 times its true size. So even if this image already looks extremely crowded, the dots are still massively exaggerated. Visually, there would be roughly another factor of 1,000 before the satellites themselves were shown at their true scale—although this does not mean that orbit could easily accommodate 1,000 times more satellites but I guess there is still some space in space.
There's already so many starlinks in some bits of LEO that a single sat breaking up will lead to a runaway chain reaction that breaks up everything in that orbit quicker than the debris will decay out of it:
> The results indicate the current population of intact objects exceeds the unstable threshold at all altitudes between 400 km and 1000 km and the runaway threshold at nearly all altitudes between 520 km and 1000 km.
https://conference.sdo.esoc.esa.int/proceedings/sdc9/paper/3...
Thanks for sharing the paper, it seems my intuition on size was bad but also my intuition on max satellite density for LEO was wrong.
Whether the pixels are not representative of actual size, seems like putting lipstick on a pig. When I look up at night, I can't see the night sky without several satellites interrupting my view. Even a brief 10 second glance, will produce at least 1.
Their is no communication need that is greater than our need to understand space and space weather. If the satellite operators can't stop destroying the night sky, their launch permission should be removed, so as their old satellites fall, new ones won't be allowed to launch.
Further, if the federal government won't intervene (looking at the U.S. because Starlink). Then states should make those satellite receivers illegal.
I always like looking at this one https://platform.leolabs.space/visualization
i just clicked on one satellite and followed it as it moved. it crossed a continent in like a minute. Is that accurate? Seems too fast.
Moreover, are the satellites all moving around like that, haphazardly?
It's not haphazard, it's a circular orbit. And at those altitudes satellites move at a little over 7km/s.
It defaults to 25x. At 1x it looks like nothing is happening.
there is a default three.js control panel. By default it has speed at 25x and 'Follow Earth' checkmark, which makes camera do weird things.
Former LeoLabs engineer ama
I'm surprised that getting our low space to this state was even legal
I'm sometimes baffled how people's knee jerk reaction is to think how to ban this. And yet those same people complain about their parents that claimed that Rock'n'Roll or DnD should be banned because it's satanic.
This is literally the coolest thing we as a species achieved that doesn't serve self-preservation purposes.
Problem is this capability is concentrated in the hands of
1. A private company.
2. Of a single country with inconsistent leaders.
I’d be less anxious if Europe had this capability instead.
The reason why Europe doesn't have this is the regulation.
I don't like that either, but nothing's stopping others from following the same path and achieving the same capabilities, other than their own inability or refusal to do what's already been done. It's been over a decade since Falcon 9's first successful landing and we're only recently starting to see similar feats from others.
Except the space in these orbits is finite and a collision at say 520 km requires quick action or the entire fleet in that orbit will eventually be destroyed.
https://conference.sdo.esoc.esa.int/proceedings/sdc9/paper/3...
You will be fine. China will have this capability soon.
Europe isn't the sort of place that would develop this capability
France has Eutelsat: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eutelsat>.
Germany had SES/Astra: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SES_Astra>.
The EU as a whole as the Galileo satnav / GPS project: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_(satellite_navigation_...>.
There are numerous other EU satellite comms providers, though most are aimed at commercial/broadcast services. That's a departure point for satellite-phone or satellite-internet, however.
Europe can and has developed similar and/or precursor capabilities.
The EU can technically do it but they won’t. Starlink dwarfs all the services you mentioned. The EU doesn’t even believe in air conditioning much less making a robust satellite network
Also I'm betting he himself has never bought these services. I signed up here on Intelsat.
> This is literally the coolest thing we as a species achieved that doesn't serve self-preservation purposes.
couldn't be more wrong
We shot thousands of tiny cubes into a heights people thought heaven would reside. Then we communicate with them at the speeds of "The whole data storage of 2000's computer" per second. They survive radiation, accelerations and flying through electromagnetic field at thousands of km/h. We can predict their movement, steer them and provide consumer priced service for tens of thousands of people. It's astronomy, mechanical, material, electrical and computer engineering at it's peak.
This is a civilization level defining achievement.
PoV dependant.
It's a civilisation that has failed to clean up its own waste and byproducts threatening its own existence.
For some, that's an outright failure, for others, less than stellar.
It was never "legal" but it wasn't specifically illegal either.
Space-based businesses are hoping to grandfather themselves in once laws are established about the use of space, and betting that by then whatever service they offer will be seen as indispensable.
There’s a lot of space in space. This is not to scale.
There's a lot of space in air, and yet we have multiple midair collisions every year.
In the last ten years we have one (1) accidental satellite collision. In 2021 when a Chinese spy satellite in a 788km orbit collided with an old rocket stage from the 90s. There was also that Indian anti-satellite weapon hitting a microsat in 2019, but that was very much intentional (and much condemned because of all the fragments it caused)
In the decade before that (so 2006-2015) we had four accidental collisions and two anti-satellite tests (China and US)
Those are not frequent events. And if you attribute any statistical significance to them, it seems we are getting much better at avoiding collisions
We have very few midair collisions every year and they almost all happen near the airports.
Surface of a sphere (spheroid) is the square of the diameter. Planes fly at ~10kms, satellites at orders of magnitude higher.
However, the Earth’s own radius dwarfs the height of LEO, so they’re actually roughly the same.
There are other reasons we don’t currently experience major problems with collisions in space, and why airplanes sometimes do, but it is not this.
Respectfully disagree as you're comparing the surface to the size of the object, so it definitely matters.
Here's some math:
Average Earth diameter: 12742kms + 10km Average airplane surface area = 500m2 12752^2*pi = 510,865,389km2 Surface flight/plane = 1021730 planes
Starlink orbit height = ~500km Surface at orbit = ~551,712,377 so ~8% increase (which is non-negligible) Average Starlink satellite surface area = ~7m2 Surface LEO/satelite = 78816053 satellites (77x compared to airplanes)
Daily flights 50k-100k. Total number of satellites <20k.
And this is only for Starlink LEO. If you go for higher orbits the surface grows substantially. Also satellites have predictable paths, altitudes, airplanes maneuver and turn, gain altitude/lose altitude. They gather around points (airfields) etc...
I would argue that 8% is absolutely negligible; however one thing that isn't is that airspace is a narrow band vertically (12 km? Not sure exactly), while LEO is about 800 km thick (from about 200 km, because the Kármán line isn't good enough, to about 1000 km).
Conversely:
> Daily flights 50k-100k. Total number of satellites <20k.
Those 20k satellites orbit roughly every 95 minutes, so they're doing ~15 orbits per day, and even the longest flights from conventional aircraft are about half that distance, so by distance each satellite in LEO is doing strictly more than the equivalent of 30 flights per day each.
Research I'm doing for a blog post has shown me that the exact position of a satellite is surprisingly variable compared to what you'd reasonably expect from a "Newtonian spherical Earth with a perfect vacuum" approximation of the orbits, enough so that it makes sense to treat 1 km as the "collision avoidance manoeuvres needed" threshold.
Airplanes are much more likely to collide, but they don't dump hyperspeed shrapnel into the airspace that persists for months or years when they do. It makes sense to be extremely paranoid about satellite collisions.
I believe the second half of your comment is exactly what I was getting at.
Yes, I agree! But a 10% increase in surface area of LEO isn't small when compared to the size of the satellite, taking into account how the surface area at 10km compares to airplanes.
10% is an outrageously large change in a normal loan interest rate and an irrelevant change when comparing the weight of a paper plane to a real one. Keeping in mind another factor in your comparison was 7700%, I'm inclined to agree the 10% is negligible in context. It's fun to think about though.
But 10% is 50 million square kilometers. If we project this surface area to a theoretical planet with a diameter of 2000kms this planet alone would support 2000+ Starlink satellites in LEO. This is again not negligible.
There are all sorts of such scenarios beyond the one being discussed where it's a relevant amount. This is true of most any measure or metric and why the context that we're talking about the skies of Earth compared to the LEO of Earth is key. Once you remove that context and start comparing against other things you can any difference insignificant or critically massive by choice.
Aircraft have both anticollision detection systems and maneuverability often lacking in satellites.
Why would it be illegal? There are virtually zero drawbacks and huge advantages to these satellites. They are not rendered to scale either, in reality they are minuscule compared to the amount of available space. There’s room for millions more spacecraft.
I think it's fair to classify the advantages as "modest" not "huge." Yes, it's cool that sailboats in the middle of the Pacific can get Internet, but the vast majority of Internet users are still connected via fiber or copper. And, arguably, the existence of Starlink could enable governments to cease the rollout of terrestrial Internet, which is a modest drawback to the technology.
I've also seen reports that, as the satellites become overburdened, speeds are pretty variable. Again, not saying it's a net negative, but I just don't think there are "huge advantages" to Starlink.
As someone who worked and briefly lived in subsaharan Africa, I will say that the advantages are huge. Bandwidth alone isn't even the whole story - latency really matters too, another area where Starlink is super helpful compared to say, trying to get fiber punched in west from the southeastern parts of Africa. I have not yet mentioned the benefits of state actors not being able to cut your fiber at sea where nobody can see them.
Fantastic now you can browse TikTok in the middle of the desert.
From the community guidelines: Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously
I'd add to your list...Or do Khan Academy, learn how to purify water, find out recent grain prices a 10 hour drive away, decide if your baby's rash needs an expensive trip in to town, and so on.
What a delusional view of reality. Do you think those who live in areas with zero fixed internet infra has the time nor the resources to sit through a few hours of Khan Academy per day, or the means to build a filter capable of purifying water?
Remote/Rural doesn't mean everyone's poor.
Yep.
This is a pretty uncharitable take. Every largish construction company in the country uses StarLink for their many projects where Internet isn't available. Yknow, actually building the country out. It's a game changer.
Huge advantages maybe in the future. Not now.
I’m thinking buying a camper van, and just travel through the world. Except I need internet, everywhere.
There are no such options. Starlink is the best, but there are two main problems with it:
- In the countries where it would be the most useful, it’s not allowed to be used (Garmin has the same problem with their Fenix 8 Pro, their availability maps are a joke) - You need to go back to your “home” country every other month (there is a non legal, thus risky, option to circumvent this for now)
So, that huge advantage is not here yet at all.
There are huge military advantages right now. The US military will not willingly give up starlink, and they can use it in every country without permission.
What does it give to the military, what they haven’t had already? Better round trip time?
I’m more familiar with how Starlink compares to existing publicly-available satellite internet options. Here are some brief points:
- data throughput orders of magnitude higher,
- the ability to use smaller and more portable antennas (e.g. ~100 Mbps with something the size of a textbook, currently ~2 Mbps and soon ~10s Mbps with your normal mobile phone),
- order of magnitude lower latency compared to GSO satellites.
Other constellations like Iridium dedicate large portions to use by government(s?), too, but simply do not have the throughput or total bandwidth that Starlink does. Your speeds there, on the expensive business plans that offer it, are measured in the low Kbps.
Weight, Cost, bandwidth, polar availablity.
In Guam it means 10Gbps without Fiber.
US runs the show. Anything is possible.
If that was true China wouldn’t be able to launch as much as they have done
US will allow you to play in their playground up to a certain point. China’s experiments wont result in a threat.
Meanwhile: Is this true?
'Secret military documents from clandestine forums between Russia and China have revealed a possible joint strategic plan to disable Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite network alongside a deep weapons development partnership spanning hypersonic missile defense and autonomous drones, The Insider reported on July 9.'
https://meduza.io/en/news/2026/07/09/russia-and-china-discus...
That is not how orbital mechanics work.
Just thinking out loud: given that we know positions of these satellites, is one able to use it for non-gps navigation? Either by using vision - by tracking or by using some electromagnetic specter - listening to satellites...
Sure, if you're able to accurately determine angles between the Earth's tangent at your location and the satellites. That's how you'd navigate using the sun, moon and stars. I suspect those natural celestial bodies are much less of a hassle than man-made satellites.
This contrasts greatly with actual GNSS – the whole point of GPS and the others is that you don't need to determine those angles. The only thing you need to determine is the signal delay (i.e. distance) from a few satellites. That's a lot more convenient.
Not an expert but I imagine the problem with using vision is the problem of angular error propagation. That is the angle-> distance error problem:
linear error≈Rtan(Δθ)≈RΔθ
Here linear error is the error in position, R is the distance from the observer to the target and θ is the angle error. You would need incredibly good optics and resolution to minimise angular error and thus linear error.
Yes but the errors would be uncorrelated and if you could use many different measurements you should be able to estimate with reasonable certainty.
Given the large R (Even starlink satellites are far away compared to positional accuracy needed) and probably pretty large angular error, your still talking error of kilometres, though with good optics you may be able to get this down to hundreds of meters. The other problem is knowing the position isn't trivial, since their position drifts relative to predicted and isn't known very precisely.
There is also the problem that as R shrinks, speed increases relative to you.
Not impossible but it's not as easy as dedicated GNSS satellites. The ranging codes in a GNSS signal are what makes it easy to find your distance from the transmitter. Starlink doesn't have that, there are some observables you could use but it's not simple.
https://navi.ion.org/content/72/1/navi.685
Yes
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/05/starlink-blocks-acce...
I just released a new update to mine yesterday with ranges and the ability to make a story of multiple saved scenes. Then they can be played back at a presentation later.
https://www.spacebook.com/
If you zoom in you can see them moving. Click on them to see their tracks. I'm surprised how random the orbits seem. It's too cloudy at the moment but maybe on a clear night I can check the accuracy by looking up.
With clear, dark skies, you definitely can.
Nice site but personally I like satellite.love more and satellitetracker3d.com is cool too, there's about 500 of these all with varying features.
That’s a good point. I understand why satellite.love stands out in terms of atmosphere—it’s the app I’d leave running in the background. Satellite Tracker 3D seems more straightforward when I want to take a closer look at a specific object, while satellitemap.space offers the most comprehensive features once you get used to its somewhat cluttered user interface. So I don’t think there’s a clear winner; each of these apps is optimized for atmosphere, user-friendliness, and data depth, respectively.
[flagged]
Nice site, but I'm really missing any altitude reference for the satellites. It's hard to use any satellite tracker with any degree of utility other than as a toy website when it's exceedingly difficult to determine and compare basic altitude information across different satellites.
Half a year ago, I captured a photograph of a long train of satellites. However, when I navigate to that location using this tool, I don’t see any satellite train present at that specific timestamp.
I wonder if there are other satellites not included in this dataset, or if I should search way further from the location on the map
A lot of the trackers miss the trains because trains occur within the first few orbits after a launch. So if they don’t start recording data until some delayed event, they miss it. I had this problem a lot with live night sky trackers not showing the trains despite me seeing them quite clearly.
It might also be taking the latest TLEs for satellites, I don't know if there's a database of historical TLEs, so it would only show the current orbit
Unfortunately the share button doesn't seem to save the state fully, the sensor selection/bookmarking doesn't carry through.
Cool app though, have it on a large screen at our work to visualise the constellations we work with as a fun screensaver type thing.
It's deeply misleading to mis-represent the size of satellites at this point.
Yeah if the lower 48 states (~2800 miles) span the width of my entire screen (2560px), each pixel represents just over a mile. The satellites at that level were rendered with dots that are ~3px or just over 3 miles/.1% of that width.
The Starlink v2 is 100ft on it's longest dimension. This means that the actual size of the satellite relative to the dot is on the same order of magnitude (.6%) as the dot is to the size of the US when it takes up my entire screen.
Seeing them "slowly" move (but in reality incredibly quickly) reminds me of reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_(novel)
Why are there demarcations towards the poles where the satellite density drops off? Seems Norway, Sweden and Finland have a much lower density of satellites .
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_inclination
In order to cover those northern/southern extremes, more expensive high inclination orbits are required (in the US these are launched from California). They are more expensive because you’re no longer getting the rotational velocity of the earth for free in your orbital velocity.
So for a LEO constellation you want to minimize the launches to high inclinations and keep the bulk in those juicy easterly ones.
My understanding, and I’m not a rocket scientist, is that it’s easier to launch east/west and it costs a lot of delta v to move into a polar orbit.
That's the first thing I noticed as well. Does that mean Africa and South America will have Starlink internet before Scandinavia?
polar orbits are hard, you have to take a big oblique track dipping into the lower lattitudes to run a trajectory that allows you to counter gravity.
the anti collision manuevers are hard as well.
orbits are simpler at lower lattitudes where you run a trajectory, close to parallel to the equator.
Populations are also far lower than at lower latitudes.
This affects both commercial potential (fewer possible subscribers) and bandwidth congestion (dittos). For both you'd want fewer birds in those orbits, and orbital dynamics only strengthen the argument.
I wanted to ask the same thing.
There are two clearly demarcations both north and south
cool site! i appreciate satellite trackers and sometimes leave satellite.love up in the background in orbit mode with the music on at home.
Strange, there aren't even 20 at a time above Germany.
How many uplinks can one satellite handle?
Just wow, I didn’t realize there’s that many star link satellites in orbit.
That big zoom-out of Earth in the opening sequence of WALL•E comes to mind.
are their orbits and trajectories computed ahead of time to avoid collisions?
Generally orbits are predicted many circumnavigations out, with manoeuvres being necessary to handle crossing paths and orbital decay from atmospheric drag.
its not the most intuitive setup but theres a lot of info available.
click on a dot and it will show up on a list to top left, click on an item in that list and you get a flyout menu to the top left with a bunch of data regarding the satellite.
Yes.
Funny the location of the ground stations. Very odd clustering.
could you use it to make an ultra small (focussed) sat dish?
Use starlink.sx instead
Man, in some ways this is a future Star Trek envisioned: a display showing you a planet's orbital hardware and its launch sites...
But the sad reality many of the hardware is Elon Musk's ejaculation stains, polluting the skies.
cool glad it has fast forward
the geosynchronous satellites fall on and bounce off earth
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