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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Generally orbits are predicted many circumnavigations out, with manoeuvres being necessary to handle crossing paths and orbital decay from atmospheric drag.
I always like looking at this one https://platform.leolabs.space/visualization
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.
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.
I'm surprised that getting our low space to this state was even legal
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
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.
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.
We have very few midair collisions every year and they almost all happen near the airports.
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.
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
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...
Yes
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/05/starlink-blocks-acce...
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.
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.
Funny the location of the ground stations. Very odd clustering.
Use starlink.sx instead
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.
Which one shows the Jewish space lazers?
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.
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
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 .
That's the first thing I noticed as well. Does that mean Africa and South America will have Starlink internet before Scandinavia?
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.
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.
I wanted to ask the same thing.
There are two clearly demarcations both north and south
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.
Just wow, I didn’t realize there’s that many star link satellites in orbit.
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.
That big zoom-out of Earth in the opening sequence of WALL•E comes to mind.
cool site! i appreciate satellite trackers and sometimes leave satellite.love up in the background in orbit mode with the music on at home.
are their orbits and trajectories computed ahead of time to avoid collisions?
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.
Generally orbits are predicted many circumnavigations out, with manoeuvres being necessary to handle crossing paths and orbital decay from atmospheric drag.
Yes.
the geosynchronous satellites fall on and bounce off earth