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Every satellite orbiting earth and who owns them (2023)

dewesoft.com

21–30 of 118 posts

Re: Every satellite orbiting earth and who owns them (2023)

#21

It's interesting that the "E" in GEO, LEO, MEO, HEO is short for three different things: https://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Space_Transportation/Ty...

It looks like (if I've parsed right) every one of them stands for "Earth", except that HEO alone can also be overloaded three ways (high-earth, highly-elliptical, and highly-eccentric).

This is unimportant, but: a site:nasa.gov search shows all three "HEO" acronyms in common use, there; and even Wikipedia abbreviates it inconsistently across entries[0-2].

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medium_Earth_orbit ("A medium Earth orbit (MEO) is an Earth-centered orbit with an altitude above a low Earth orbit (LEO) and below a high Earth orbit (HEO)")

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highly_elliptical_orbit ("A highly elliptical orbit (HEO) is")

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Earth_orbit ("In this article, the non-standard abbreviation of HEO is used for high Earth orbit[2]")

[edit]: I overlooked the abbreviation of "geostationary equatorial orbit" for GEO, which brings it up to four different "E's"!

Re: Every satellite orbiting earth and who owns them (2023)

#22

Stats that are based only on the number of satellites can be very misleading as they don't differentiate between a 5 ton comm sat and an 1 kg cubesat.

Weight is irrelevant. They will all tear through anything like butter and break apart into thousands of pieces in a conjunction.

Re: Every satellite orbiting earth and who owns them (2023)

#24

It's interesting that the "E" in GEO, LEO, MEO, HEO is short for three different things: https://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Space_Transportation/Ty...

LEO is Low Earth Orbit

MEO is Medium Earth Orbit

The E is short for the same thing in this case.

GEO for Geostationary and HEO for High-Eccentricity are interesting, though.

Re: Every satellite orbiting earth and who owns them (2023)

#25
For anyone interested in current data like this, Jonathan McDowell maintains GCAT which is a General Catalog of Artificial Space Objects (and does so fastidiously).

https://www.planet4589.org/space/gcat/index.html

Be warned if you planning to ingest this dataset, the dates are fun =)

Re: Every satellite orbiting earth and who owns them (2023)

#26

It's interesting that the "E" in GEO, LEO, MEO, HEO is short for three different things: https://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Space_Transportation/Ty...

It looks like (if I've parsed right) every one of them stands for "Earth", except that HEO alone can also be overloaded three ways (high-earth, highly-elliptical, and highly-eccentric). This is unimportant, but: a site:nasa.gov search shows all three "HEO" acronyms in common use, there; and even Wikipedia abbreviates it inconsistently across entries[0-2]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medium_Earth_orbit ( "A medium E…

> geostationary equatorial orbit

I thought GEO stood for Geostationary Earth Orbit, since a geostationary orbit must be equatorial anyway. But actually "Earth" would also be redundant, since "Geo-" already stands for Earth.

Re: Every satellite orbiting earth and who owns them (2023)

#27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It looks like (if I've parsed right) every one of them stands for "Earth", except that HEO alone can also be overloaded three ways (high-earth, highly-elliptical, and highly-eccentric). This is unimportant, but: a site:nasa.gov search shows all three "HEO" acronyms in common use, there; and even Wikipedia abbreviates it inconsistently across entries[0-2]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medium_Earth_orbit ( "A medium E…

> geostationary equatorial orbit I thought GEO stood for Geostationary Earth Orbit, since a geostationary orbit must be equatorial anyway. But actually "Earth" would also be redundant, since "Geo-" already stands for Earth.

I understand it's both, but "equatorial" is more precise to distinguish it from GSO, a non-equatorial [g]eo[s]ynchronous [o]rbit. Otherwise, they would both be "GEO".

Re: Every satellite orbiting earth and who owns them (2023)

#28

> "Earth has 4550 satellites in orbit" Rapidly obsoleted information. SpaceX alone has > 7500 satellites in orbit. It added 2,300+ satellites in the one year period ending Jun 2025.

This really isn't all that much if you pause to consider it. For example. Lets take the larger possible number of 7500 plus 2,300 plus the 4,550 satellites noted up to 2021. That's a total of just under 15,000 satellites. Most of those are fairly small objects, at the most about the size of a typical mini-van, with most being quite a bit smaller than that.

Now, all of this is spread over a three-dimensional topography that's much larger than the total surface area of the Earth, and because their orbits are, as mentioned, three-dimensionally occupying various altitudes, the size of the total topography they move through is enormously larger than just one single surface area in square kilometers of a single hypothetical sphere X km above the Earth's surface. In the least case, even if all existing orbital satellites were stationed at the lowest possible orbital altitude, that's still quite a bit bigger than the 509 600 000 square km of the Earth's total surface. (too lazy to calculate the specific increment in this moment)

Across all of that, just 15,000 objects that are individually smaller than your average family sedan.

For comparison, the island of Manhattan has approximately 116,000 buildings crammed into it. If you spread those more or less equi-distantly from each other across the whole of the Earth's surface, water or air, there'd still be a tremendous amount of empty space between them. That's nearly 10 times as many objects individually much larger than any human satellite, across a much smaller surface area than what's occupied by our orbital satellites.

(Yes, I know we also have a shit-load of other inert junk zipping around up there at tens of thousands of KM per hour, but even if that stuff, most of which is very tiny, were included, we're still talking about an enormous amount of empty space between objects)

Re: Every satellite orbiting earth and who owns them (2023)

#30

It's incredible how many satellites Space X have launched It's also surprising from a layman's perspective the "freedom" to launch rockets into space without necessarily needing permission, the originating country of course needs to approve it but none else

Permission granted by whom? Agencies and companies that launch satellites are subject only to the laws of the countries in which they are based. And it is not even imaginable to have a NPT-like system where a few "special" countries have the right to launch satellites while the others don't.

That generally falls to the International Telecommunication Union globally, as a satellite without a radio is basically junk.

Then maybe the 4(+) countries that can field anti sat weapons beyond that.

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