Live Starlink Satellite and Coverage Map

Live Starlink Satellite and Coverage Map
satellitemap.space

The nice thing about that Mike's is you can see exactly where you are in relation to nearby satellites and base stations. And get a pretty good guess as to where your packets are going to go. It is all guesswork - SpaceX only shares what they are required to by the FCC. But it's been pretty accurate in the way I can test it.

(Also try clicking the little ringed planet icon in upper right to get an orbital chart.)

In the early days there would only be 1 or 2 satellites in range of my house sometimes and I could feel the lag as the dish switched. Back then it only switched every 15 seconds whether a tree was about to block the view or not. Now there's regularly 10+ satellites to choose from and a smarter algorithm for switching to maintain signal. There's still significant problems compared to a wired connection or even fixed wireless but Starlink has definitely been a big improvement for my life.

Yes, space looks crowded in these visualizations. But the size of the satellites is exaggerated here by thousands of times. Space is huge and the collision risk is extremely low. If displayed at their true size the satellites would not be visible, and indeed the vast majority are not visible in the real life night sky. The exception is recently launched satellites that are still in transit to their final orbits, but even those are only visible sometimes and generally only within an hour or two after sunset or before sunrise.

No, Kessler Syndrome is not a realistic concern for satellites in these orbits. Satellites here experience atmospheric drag and fall out of orbit in five years or so. Collision debris has a higher surface area to mass ratio due to the square-cube law and deorbits faster than that. And it takes a lot less than five years for debris to fall below the orbits of other satellites where it no longer poses any threat of a chain reaction. And no, a collision between two satellites in circular orbits cannot throw debris into much longer-lasting orbits, due to how orbital mechanics works. And even if Kessler Syndrome did somehow happen despite all that, it wouldn't trap us on Earth even for the five year period; a debris cloud would still be quite sparse and launching rockets through it would be no problem since the time spent in the cloud and thus probability of collision would be negligible.

The legend and the help sections are not very helpful.