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.
Is it though? Companies thinking about profit over everything else seems to be the status quo
Real-time map of every Starlink satellite in orbit
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Re: Real-time map of every Starlink satellite in orbit
#12It’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.
I'm not an expert in this field, but I have the feeling that 3k satellites in orbit is a small percentage of what we have at the moment.
What still amazes me is that the orbit seems to not be owned by any country. Reading from another comment it looks like the FCC regulated this - but I'm still confused since it covers multiple countries, and I'm pretty sure not everyone had a saying in whether they agreed on this.
As a possible future user, it's still spectacular though.
Re: Real-time map of every Starlink satellite in orbit
#13It’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.
The map makes these things appear much larger than they are at scale. There is a massive amount of space out there.
Re: Real-time map of every Starlink satellite in orbit
#14It’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.
I think you might be underestimating just how big space is.
Re: Real-time map of every Starlink satellite in orbit
#15It’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.
This is a bad take. There are plenty of regulatory bodies that control what SpaceX is allowed to do. The satellites are not visible to the eye in their operational orbits and are incredibly tiny compared to the vastness of space. Their depiction here is thousands of times larger than actual size.
Re: Real-time map of every Starlink satellite in orbit
#16It’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.
I'm not an expert in this field, but I have the feeling that 3k satellites in orbit is a small percentage of what we have at the moment. What still amazes me is that the orbit seems to not be owned by any country. Reading from another comment it looks like the FCC regulated this - but I'm still confused since it covers multiple countries, and I'm pretty sure not everyone had a saying in whether they agreed on this. A…
No country owns space. There is no formal agreement on where airspace for a country ends but informally it is up to the extent of Earth's atmosphere.
Re: Real-time map of every Starlink satellite in orbit
#17[flagged]
You don't need an affiliation with a company to mindlessly parrot it's marketing material.
Re: Real-time map of every Starlink satellite in orbit
#18Similar, 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.
Re: Real-time map of every Starlink satellite in orbit
#19They'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.
Re: Real-time map of every Starlink satellite in orbit
#20It’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.
Imagine if you covered the surface of the earth in 30,000 cars spread out evenly (including the ocean). They would be very difficult to find visually without them reflecting light and the space used is inconsequential.