Satellite Tracker – Live Map of Starlink and 30k Satellites
satellitemap.space164 points by rolph 3 days ago
164 points by rolph 3 days ago
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?
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.
It's not haphazard, it's a circular orbit. And at those altitudes satellites move at a little over 7km/s.
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.
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...
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.