I've been confused why our Starlink coverage is so good in rural Manitoba, Canada. On HN and elsewhere I heard complaining from Americans about how the service is over-subscribed and over-saturated, but everyone I talk to here raves about the service. I assumed we simply had less subscribers.
This visualization has revealed another reason to me: the satellites hit the northern extent of their orbit and dwell over our province. Who knew orbital mechanics would work out in our favour.
Similar, with a slightly different goal: https://starlink.sx/ It was designed more with the intent of evaluating coverage of Starlink, especially in the early days when coverage was more sparse, but it also shows the satellites in orbit. The total numbers do have a slight mismatch between the sites.
I made a version of whatsoverhead.com but for satellites: You could ask it, "Hey, Siri, what's overhead…in space?" and it would tell you what the nearest satellite to you was. It was an attempt to help situate yourself in the invisible world of spacecraft flying overhead all the time. The thing is, 70-90% of the time the answer is "STARLINK-1234". It was shocking to me. The app achieved the goal I intended, and the answer was a surprise–it was a more visceral way of understanding the fact that there are a lot of Starlink satellites, for sure.
This is wild. I had no idea of the scope of Starlink satellites in orbit. What is the life cycle of one of these satellites? How long do they last in orbit? Can they be controlled where they crash land down? How many different versions of the satellites are in orbit? I wonder how often they have their software updated and what happens in the failure state of an unsuccessful update?
When I fullscreen this page the globe is 870 pixels wide, equating to about 9.1 miles per pixel. Each satellite is represented by a cube 3 dots on edge. This equates to 27 miles per edge or 19,683 cubic miles of volume for each square represented. That's approximately four times the total volume of the Great Lakes in the US.
This is really cool but what's with the borderline propaganda in the sidebar interlaced with the data?
I prefer https://satellitemap.space/
You can see the base station locations there, which is helpful in visualizing how the system works in various locales.
Very cool! It pretty much covered the entire earth. I wonder about the connectivity and speed difference between the north poles and those in the middle. I was using it on a cruise, it is very stable.
The first 60 Starlink satellites launched in May of 2019[0].
What happens when there are half a dozen startups with 42,000 satellites around earth?
Strangely, a search for how many satellites are in orbit right now, returns those numbers:
- 9,494 active satellites
USA 2926 China 493 United Kingdom 450
So the 5k plus from Starlink are in this count yet?
It’s wild that a private company was able to take up this much orbital space / night sky and the people of the earth had no say in the matter.
Nice. It'd be cool to filter by version. Also visualizations like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rddTXl_7Wr8 are useful for getting the status of how far along each shell is to completion.
Striking visualization, makes me wonder: can this density of satellite coverage meaningfully change how earth appears to an alien civilization many lightyears away, in a way that coverage by 1% or 10% as many satellites over the last ~50 years would not?
It would be nice if the globe didn’t rotate by itself, or at least would only make one rotation per 24 hours. When looking at the movements in a particular area, it’s annoying that the area is always slowly rotating away.
Maps like these are really useful for folks developing satcom firmware. I use https://iridiumwhere.com at least a couple times a week to help me test code.
This one is particularly interesting for the sheer density of it - that's a TON of satellites. On a related note, anyone who hasn't done so should get to their country's lowest light-pollution area and do some star gazing (for Americans, I suggest Badlands National Park). With constellations like Starlink, we won't have those kinds of night skies for much longer.
Heh, to someone not overly familiar with North American geography, the clear cutoff between off-polar orbits and the few exceptions almost looks as if they decided to turn around at the Canadian border.
Kuiper and other proposed LEO networks have a lot of catching up to do in terms of actually sending hardware to space.
There's a wikipedia page for list of starlink launches and just scrolling through it and skimming takes a considerable amount of time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Starlink_and_Starshiel...
This can't be an accurate realt-time map. The satellites are travelling way, way too fast. This map shows a satellite travelling from LA to Denver in 10 seconds.
You can literally see the satellites at night and they do not traverse horizon to horizon 1/10th as fast as depicted here.
> The Starlink constellation could serve up to 188,160 MB/sec to Earth.
Does that feel very slow to anyone else?
This map gives the odd sense that the sky is absolutely buzzing with satellites and yet they are still incredibly sparse "on the ground". Look at any western US state and you'll see just a handful above at any time.
looks impressive... but in reality "5,601 orbiting satellites", this is nothing.. I remember seeing that their ultimate goal is in the 30,000 region.
Imagine what that globe with red dots will look like then!
https://www.space.com/spacex-starlink-satellites.html
>The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has granted SpaceX permission to fly 12,000 Starlink satellites, and the company has filed paperwork with an international regulator to loft up to 30,000 additional spacecraft.
> The last Starlink mission launched
> 1 days, 17 hours, 0 mins, 21 sec ago.
> The next Starlink mission launches in
> 51 minutes, 19 seconds.
> Over the last 365 days, Starlink launches every
> 5.14 days on average.
Insane launch cadence on display. And it is only going to get better.
The globe is almost invisible. Very hard to make out land. I was going to say I guess I'm happy they respected my dark mode preference, but this seems to be how it looks regardless of preference.
Why is there such a sudden drop off in satellite density over 53°N ?
This one has been around for ages, and it does work on mobile too.
Even when I dont like Musk he did what Google tried for years
> Bringing internet connection to everyone on Earth is an incredibly important mission. Consider supporting this mission by joining SpaceX's Starlink team.
I wish I could too.
Does Starlink work in Norway or Alaska?
I would never have guessed Starlink had this many satellites.
They're really moving. I watched one go from Cape York to a similar latitude as Tasmania - about 4000km - in around 23 seconds. So about 600,000km/hr; around 20x faster than ISS (28,000km/hr). I have no idea why that speed was chosen, or if other speeds would work, just found it interesting.
Interesting. What library is that? Does it use propagation off from TLE data?
I want a realtime version of this for my lockscreen! Very impressive.
It looks just like that one scene in End of Evangelion.
There is also https://satellitemap.space/
> not optimized for mobile use... is best enjoyed on a desktop
> Please rotate your device to landscape for the optimal satellite viewing experience.
Ummm...
Wow
Just use Starlink.sx
There's got to be a private jet tracking joke in here somewhere but I'm too tired to come up with it.
Wow, I knew Starlink had an enormous constellation, but visualizing it like that really empathizes the scope. Would be cool if one day you could get your connectivity needs handled by a single company cheaply, almost anywhere in the world, without bothering about new contracts, moving cities or country borders.