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.
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.
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.
There are 7.8 billion people on earth. 7.5 billion of them had no say at all, and 0.33 billion of them had a tiny say via elected representatives who wrote the laws before starlink was even envisioned.
I'm pretty sure if a global vote was held on the question of "Would you like to have 10,000 satellites launched so you have the option of paying a US company for broadband anywhere in the world?", the vote outcome would be a firm 'No'.
If you ask the entire world you would get stupid answers to a lot of questions. "How old is the universe?" for example would get it hilariously wrong.
Particularly given that the satellites are absolutely minuscule compared to the distances between them. People are bad at conceptualising tiny fractions.
Not miniscule enough to not interfere with astronomy due to the exposure times and light sensitivity involved.
But yes, they're not big enough to cause a "space junk preventing space travel" kind of scenario.
I think the 2nd statement of yours is a false dilemma: Starlink is increasing risks in space travel - a space rocket now needs (even more - otherwise it would be a false dilemma as well) maneuverability to stick to the planned path or avoid a satellite if the path changed, I don't think it's easy considering how rockets are propelled by continuous explosions, where an engine becoming disabled is somewhat normal…
And of course once all goes to hell and you have a chain reaction of destroyed satellites destroying other satellites - each next satellite moves the scenario towards a positive feedback loop.
once all goes to hell and you have a chain reaction of destroyed satellites destroying other satellites - each next satellite moves the scenario towards a positive feedback loop
There is no orbital solution in which this happens to any meaningful extent. Even worst-case scenarios of massive anti-satellite activity create localised messes that clear in a few months.
From Wikipedia[1]:
One implication is that the distribution of debris in orbit could render space activities and the use of satellites in specific orbital ranges difficult for many generations.
From the same article:
However, even a catastrophic Kessler scenario at LEO would pose minimal risk for launches continuing past LEO, or satellites travelling at medium Earth orbit (MEO) or geosynchronous orbit (GEO). The catastrophic scenarios predict an increase in the number of collisions per year, as opposed to a physically impassable barrier to space exploration that occurs in higher orbits.
There's also a statement by SpaceX about why Starlink won't cause this but that's not worth the paper it's printed on given that SpaceX would of course say that.
It does sound like the Kessler syndrome risk is higher for heavier, higher orbit satellites so a more likely issue would be a higher orbit satellite starting a debris cascade that could take out Starlink (and cause Kessler syndrome) rather than Starlink satellites going haywire and causing the cascade themselves.
sound like the Kessler syndrome risk is higher for heavier, higher orbit satellites
A Kessler scenario, not syndrome. Localised to a set of orbits within which you see a rise of collisions. The number of affected orbits doesn’t increase for more than a few months, at which point the problem is constrained within space.
the distribution of debris in orbit could render space activities and the use of satellites in specific orbital ranges difficult for many generations
Sure, if you overload a high orbit you could render it unusable for a long time. In its worst case, it’s still highly localised. Congestion in LEO has tradeoffs, but Kessler syndrome (much less a scenario) isn’t one of them.
Starlink satellites naturally decay into unstable orbits after 5 years without boost-backs
You can see them with a naked eye so it's not that minuscule. Either just before sunrise or just after sunset, when the sky is black, and so your eye adapts and you start to see things otherwise too dark to be visible on the sky (stars), the Starlink satellites reflect the light from the Sun (because they are higher than you and so their daylight is longer, earlier sunrise, later sunset).
You're mixing up matters of logic and fact (how old the universe is) with matters of personal preference (like what I want to eat, should flying cars fill the skyline of my city).
People can be trusted a lot more in the second category, which is generally also their right. If they have valid concerns that are getting dismissed, they're not gonna like talking to you.
Some, but not all
You could ask a less leading question, like “would you like it if you had the ability to rent infrastructure to get access to a much better internet connection that your local ISPs, and even your own government have no chance of building themselves ?”
I’m British, so this question definitely applies to me, by the way.
For a good portion of the world I think you'd have to add, "...at a price roughly equal to [insert large percentage, in places exceeding 100%] your monthly income," to get a more realisic response.
When it comes to global topics, I think a lot of people in high income countries often forget that we live in a privileged bubble.
7% of the world has a college degree.
The median full-time fast food worker in the US is in the top 6% income, globally.
I think in the places you’re thinking of, using starlink as backhaul for community wireless is more likely ?
There’s always going to be capex to bring the internet to far-flung places, but my point was that starlink means it’s no longer “dig a 100km trench and install a fibre” expensive.
Presuming that you translated it to every language:
* 3 billion people don't care because they don't use the internet
* 7 billion people don't care because they wouldn't be able to afford it anyway
* 7 billion people don't care because the question doesn't make much sense to them nor do they really understand what it is about
* 4 billion people likely won't participate because voting is not an activity they are familiar with and/or is not something they desire to participate in.
Direct democracy also has a pretty bad track record in producing just, principled, and reasoned results.
X billion people don't care because they don't use the internet/can't afford
But nearly all 7.8 billion live under the night sky and see 'moving stars'. And that's why I think a global vote would come out saying 'no'.
Vanishingly few of those people have any idea what a satellite is, let alone that they may be visible in the night sky. The vast majority of the global population leans on religion or superstition to explain natural phenomenon. If you know what a star even is, you're in the minority. You might as well flip a coin, because very few people on the planet would even understand the question.
I think you're right that the vote would be no, but not for the same reason you do.
I think many people reading:
Would you like to have 10,000 satellites launched
... would stop right there and say "I have no idea what that is, so no"
There are a lot of good reasons we don't have worldwide direct democracy for everything...
And it's absolutely not true that the US is the only country that has a say here. International regulatory bodies exist as well. Maybe the citizens of some countries don't have effective governments that express their will at the UN but that's not SpaceX's fault. There is a process to have everyone's voice heard. It's not the wild west.
And I think you underestimate how much people like and want truly global wireless internet service. The value to the world is enormous.
This is literally how it has been since the start of the space age. For people outside of the US or Russia, not having any say in what happens in space is normal. The only difference here is that Americans are surprised when they themselves have to go through the same thing, but even then the American government has full control of starlink for all intents and purposes.
It's always funny to me when I see this "7.8 billion people didn't choose a private corporation", as if they chose the american government lol.
They'd also vote to end gay rights
I'm pretty sure the vote would be a firm "No"
So... you're critizing having no elections by assuming the outcome of one based purely on personal intuition? I think you're making the same mistake you seem to criticize.
Also just think about the impracticality of doing something like that and at the same time the fact that of that 7.5B, 90% probably wouldn't care. How many complaints about starlink have you received from, idk, China or Zimbawe or rural Russia?
What alternative do you propose? To do nothing? We organize into democracies, where everyone votes on representatives, which rule the controlling institutions giving permissions (or not) for such undertakings.
It's surprising to me so many people are angry over the sky being polluted visually, and not over common air poisoning by burning fuel, river pollution by dumping waste, ocean and sea pollution by ship transportation, plastic pollution, and many other... Rain water is already above (arbitrary) safe toxicity level and so shouldn't be drunk... So what you're doing is you're in a house fire and complain on some noise. This doesn't mean of course you're wrong: the pollution is a problem to astronomers and to the safety of space ventures.
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.
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.
informally it is up to the extent of Earth's atmosphere.
And where does the atmosphere end? :) From Wikipedia[1]:
Exosphere: 700 to 10,000 km (440 to 6,200 miles)
The exosphere is the outermost layer of Earth's atmosphere (though it is so tenuous that some scientists consider it to be part of interplanetary space rather than part of the atmosphere).
There's the ITU
I have the feeling that 3k satellites in orbit is a small percentage of what we have at the moment.
It's less than half, but not by that much.
The map makes these things appear much larger than they are at scale. There is a massive amount of space out there.
That's what they said about IPv4 addresses. But this time there isn't even the possibility of an IPv6-like upgrade.
What? Of course there is. Starlink satellites have a five year lifespan before they deorbit, and can be commanded to do so earlier if there’s an issue.
I think you might be underestimating just how big space is.
An entire universe is quite different to a considerably more limited orbital space
Is it though? Companies thinking about profit over everything else seems to be the status quo
Good. They're regulated, so they meet non-profit objectives. As for the rest, you want them to chase profit, as that's a better way to pay for things than the government taking it from all of us.
How much of the night sky did they take up exactly?
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.
The Starlink constellation could serve up to 188,160 MB/sec to Earth.
Does that feel very slow to anyone else?
So 100Mbps for ~16k people. Barely useful. I can only ever see it being useful for real rural people, who don't get any 4G signal, but these people might also not want to pay the crazy subscription fees or $500+ for the equipment.
I don't see any reason why anyone living in or <100km near a city would ever want this. 5G mobile can already provide 500Mbps and fiber is just unbeatable. At least the night sky was ruined for a billionaire's useless constellation.
Nobody uses 100Mbps continuously. Not even close. Would probably average about 0.5% of that capacity. 16000/0.005 = 3.2 million customers. That's quite close to the 2.6 million they have on the page.
Nobody uses 100Mbps continuously
Only because nobody can sensibility obtain 100Mbps as a connection. I'm still stuck on 2Mb ADSL.
Where games are now 30-60GB in download, family streaming is a thing. This would be topped pretty easily.
100/1024*86400/8 = 1054 GB every day
You'd have to download 17 of those games every day to saturate your 100 Mbps connection.
It's about 350 hours of Netflix streaming per day.
I have Starlink. I'm 12km away from a town that has cable internet, but the only wired connection I can get is dial-up (fibre should be available in about 2 years: https://www.ontario.ca/page/ontario-connects-making-high-spe...).
Previously I subscribed to a local ISP that only supported 5mb/s, then one of the large Telcos (Bell) offered a 4G wireless internet, but it only had 100GB cap. With the overage charges I incurred the cost was greater than Starlink and then they oversold the service so it was nearly unusable from the time the kids got home from school until about 9pm.
Starlink has been rock solid for me, it's been well worth the money.
Same, we went from long-range WiFi that cost us over $250/month and dropped out constantly to rock-solid 50Mbps for $120. Starlink gets slower during Netflix hours but never slow enough you can't run a few simultaneous video streams.
I don't see any reason why anyone living in or <100km near a city would ever want this.
Because not every country has widespread consumer-grade 5G and fiber-optic infrastructure set up? I swear some of you here live in a bubble and don't consider that there's an entire world much bigger than just your <insert place of residence>.
I live in that kind of a country in the Balkan, and the overwhelming majority of people here get way less than 100mbs download speed in their homes, no matter how much they're willing to pay for better internet, because at the end of the day, there is no infrastructure, and the monopoly (*technically* a duopoly) of isps don't see any reason whatsoever to broaden their infrastructure
Exactly, I am a happy starlink user, I live in a rural area around 70km from a nearest city and only options here are crappy 4G which can do 20 mbps on a good day and starlink which gives me up to 200 mbps download speeds. I highly doubt there will be faster 5G/whateverG here anytime in the future since the population in this area is so low and declining so starlink is pretty much only option here.
The "crazy subscription fees" are about $40 more than the $80/month I pay for pretty modest Internet. Not everyone has great cellular service. I barely get it 50 miles west of Boston--presumably because I live at the base of a hill between myself and the tower. I routinely lose cell entirely when I take the train in through some of the highest-end suburbs in the area.
Starlink really is a game-changer for people who don't have other good Internet options. And there are a lot of them even if they don't live on a montaintop in Wyoming someplace. Can everyone in rural locations afford broadband at all? No. But Starlink is actually pretty competitive with equivalent broadband offerings.
I am a long way from being a Musk fanboy but Starlink is genuinely extremely useful for a lot of people.
I agree - for a while it was my only option, and I would have paid 10X what they charged to have it. Now I have other options (FTTH), but was quite happy with Starlink while I had it installed.
>I don't see any reason why anyone living in or <100km near a city would ever want this
Do you think being within 100km of a city guarantees good service? I used to live literally right on the outskirts of a major British city, the best internet I could get was 10mbps ADSL, not because there was nothing better in the area but because the local exchange was oversubscribed and no one could connect us with no estimate of when a space might free up. Also mobile signal was really crappy because it was in a valley.
But even ignoring that weird edge case - plenty of small villages around here where internet is really poor and there are no 5G masts anywhere nearby. A friend of mine has starlink because the only other option was 36mbps through BT, even though he lives few miles out of a city.
>. At least the night sky was ruined for a billionaire's useless constellation.
On that we 10000% agree.
Forget rural areas and small villages...
I live in Los Angeles (the city, not the county), directly in between Century City and UCLA - https://maps.app.goo.gl/vUetG5fBjaiCkfXm8.
When we moved into our house in 2020, the best wired internet we could get was 12mbit/sec ADSL. There were no 5G providers. It took months to get one cable ISP to pull wire to enable us to get >100mbit/sec downstream, but it's still limited to 20mbit/sec upstream.
Currently there is fiber internet from AT&T that comes within 200 meters of our house, but they have no announced plans come to our block.
I went to https://www.starlink.com/map to see coverage you can see that dark areas marked by political boundaries, not physical: Venezuela, Cuba, China, Russia, Makes you think.
Starlink was never meant for the urban masses. Its usecase (from the start) was for people in rural areas where low or no speed options are available. This is perfect for people like my parents living at the top of a mountain in rural SC. They just managed to get a cellular signal a few years ago. And their only choice of internet was dialup or DirectTV (HughesNet? -- slow, high latency and expensive).
My reading is that's current throughput, not possible throughput.
Also, 100mbps internet is not achievable via normal means for most of the worlds population. Your view appears fairly narrow.
Even more:
Starlink is the world’s most advanced satellite internet constellation, beaming terabytes per second to the most remote parts of Earth. Made possible by the advent of reusable rocketry, Starlink marks the beginning of a new age of orbital technology.
And 188 Gbit/s is still quite far away from Tbytes/s.
Also the later counters of Tbytes of "bandwidth" per day are somewhat weird measures. Unfortunately way too often people denote the measure of data/time as bandwidth while it is more accurately named throughput. Also as a rate it shouldn't be counting up like that. I suspect it means data transferred today.
Generally speaking I think the website is quite cool, but I wish they'd dial down the fanboyism.
Isn't that 188GB per second - roughly 1.5tbit?
My understanding was the intent is to serve traffic across the mesh and only downlink it at the closest terrestrial point, which should allow for significantly more.
The numbers I find a bit confusing here.
"The Starlink constellation could serve up to 188.160 MB/sec to Earth."
So is that dot a decimal point? I suppose so, because it's used like that in the following numbers
"9,373,421.84 gigabytes total bandwidth to Earth so far today"
But isnt the 188 MB/sec the bandwith and the 9 million gigabytes the transferred amount of data? How can that amount go up way faster than 188 MB / sec?
I'm confused.
The maps nice though.
And spread across their 2.6 million customers, it doesn't seem like a lot.
Depends on where you live.
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.
I live in a dark skies area in the Southwest USA. I frequently see the trains as they are inserted into orbit, but your chance of seeing an individual Starlink satellite is zero. It's like trying to see a single object the size of a picnic table, in the dark, 400km away, going 27,000km/hr.
This is totally incorrect, what do you think you are seeing in the trains? You can easily see each individual satellite. Just after sunset you can see many individual satellites, not just starlink.
Starlink reduces reflectivity with shielding once the satellites are in orbit. That’s why you only see the trails on their way to insertion.
Without the shield, you’re right that the satellites would be visible post insertion.
They added the sun shields in mid-2020, after several hundred satellites had already been launched. Those remain visible, and make up about 8% of their fleet today.
Kinda makes me wonder what we're going to do about all these satellites in 50-60 years when there's thousands of decommissioned ones floating around.
They deorbit themselves after about 5 years... so if starlink goes tits up, at worst you'll see the satellites for around 5 years. Sooner if they are intentionally deorbited.
They’re easy to knock out of orbit and auto decay because of the light atmospheric drag. Shouldn’t be a problem.
Higher orbit debris could last a lot longer.
Starlink satellites are visible with a 20x80 binoculars, shortly after sunset, in the west. Later they aren't visible at all.
I do a little stargazing with binoculars.
Last summer, maybe two ago, I was camping in the middle of nowhere, laying on a sandy beach after sunset and saw a starlink satellite train go up. It was a truly ethereal experience.
Continuing this "I saw a Starlink train" train, I was in Yosemite doing a stargazing tour (i.e. with a guide using a powerful handheld laser to point out individual stars), and we saw the clean line of "stars" making its way across the sky.
A quick search confirmed for us that it was from a recent Starlink launch, and not aliens.
Seeing high-albedo LEO satellites in orbit is easy with under a dark sky. I remember seeing individual satellites all the time while camping as a child, I'd see at least 2 per minute, all traveling in the same direction. This was before constellations became a thing.
Let's do a bit of back-of-the-envelope rocket science.
Starlink has satellites in several orbits, but at least one I know they're using is 319mi (they have approval for shells as low as 210mi, but I'm not sure if they're using that yet). A human's central vision is about 60 degrees (NOT the same thing as your full field of view). The radius of the earth ranges between 3950 and 3963 miles. I'll call it 3955 for our purposes.
(3955+319) gives us a radius of 4274 miles. Throw in that 17,000mph (27,000 km/hr) figure, one can determine that a Starlink satellite moves at about 3.78 degrees per minute with respect to the center of Earth.
To make things simpler, (again, back of the envelope), I'm going to calculate this using basic trig. The radius of the earth is much larger than the satellite's orbit, so this shouldn't skew the numbers too much.
Imagine standing on the ground and looking straight upwards into the night sky. At a distance of 319 miles, your 60 degree field of view covers a plane that's 2⋅319⋅tan(30°) = 368 miles wide.
This plane cuts a chord through the satellite's circular orbit. Those two points are 2⋅arcsin(368 / (2⋅4274)) = 4.93 degrees apart.
Knowing both the angle between the two points on the chord and the angular speed of the satellite with respect to Earth, we can determine that the Starlink satellite will spend roughly 1.3 minutes (1 minute and 18 seconds) within your central field of view. So, the satellite is definitely not fast enough for the naked eye to miss it, assuming it's big and/or bright enough.
Normally, you'd be right about a picnic table hundreds of miles away. That's tiny and you'd never see it, no matter what speed it was moving at. However, satellites are highly reflective and because they're sitting high above Earth, they can be hit by sunlight even during the night. Maybe(?) they wouldn't be visible in the problem I just laid out, where you're looking straight up, but turn your head a bit and it becomes feasible.
Throw in the fact that there are thousands of them all marching in a spherical parade around Earth, and it's totally reasonable that they'd be visible from the ground. In fact, there's a whole website dedicated to this very phenomenon: https://findstarlink.com/. If we didn't have so much light pollution on the ground in my neck of the woods, the website indicates that I could see them a couple times a night.
It says "No affiliation with SpaceX or Starlink", but I find this hard to believe. The entire left column is straight-up advertising copy, culminating in an ad for jobs at Starlink.
Astroturfing? HN has ads, this should be one.
It's easy to forget given the direction Elon has been heading ever since the "pedo guy" comment but there are a lot of techno-optimists who are obsessively in love with all things SpaceX (and - tho now to a lesser extent - Tesla).
This turf isn't astro but it's also not really turf to begin with - just a very enthusiastic singular blade of grass.
Isn’t it against this site’s guidelines to accuse people of astroturfing?
Okay? I literally said it's not astroturfing. Words mean things. I'd argue the lack of reading comprehension presented in the replies to my comment bords on violating the site's guidelines too.
Astroturfing is when a moneyed interest group (an organisation, political candidate, corporation, activist investor, etc) creates a sockpuppet "grassroots movement", usually by creating a coordinated marketing campaign and brand identity that claims to represent an amorphous group of "concerned citizens" rather than the actual people or organizations funding these efforts. The reason there's a word for this in English is that the US has seen this a lot around propositions citizens are allowed to vote on directly, often impacting businesses or sometimes at conflict with the interests of influential religious groups.
The key component here is that astroturf (derived from a brand name for artificial grass) is meant to mimick grassroots activism. Grassroots activism is called that because it is a bottom-up activist movement (hence "growing" like grass) made up of many distinct individuals (i.e. the blades of grass) acting in unison, rather than the typical top-down political movements initiated by political parties and other existing large organizations.
My point is that while the site very much looks like something SpaceX would plausibly be interested in producing or funding, it's explicitly operated by one person who intentionally promotes the company to the point of advertising them as an employer by linking to their jobs page. Hence, it's a single blade of grass. It's apparently genuine not "artificial" but it's not a movement so calling it grassroots (which "it's not astroturf" would suggest) wouldn't be right either.
Usually when speaking of efforts led by individuals the accusations are words like "shill", not "astroturf". And he doesn't seem to be that either. So given that the interest seems genuine, I'd suggest "cheerleader" - "fanboy" would fit but is usually used dismissively. The core here is that it's not just a satellite hobbyist who thinks Starlink is cool and did a fancy illustration, it's someone who genuinely thinks SpaceX itself is great.
The reason I mention Elon Musk should be obvious given that he used to be the hype man for SpaceX (and to a lesser extent still is). He used to be so dominant in popular culture that he even cameoed in an Iron Man because people kept calling him "real life Tony Stark". The website makes sense in that context of unquestioning adoration. My point is that - arguably starting with the "pedo guy" incident - public perception of Elon Musk (and thus his companies too) has tanked since then so it might be odd to still see someone being such a dedicated fan of one of his companies they'd essentially create a marketing project for them. The replies making fun of people (including myself) for being "so consumed with hatred for Musk" make my point: in the past, Elon Musk wasn't so much hated as dismissed and the perception that mainstream opinion is unfairly hostile to him is a recent phenomenon that pretty much started around the time of the "pedo guy" incident.
So to reiterate:
- I didn't accuse anyone of astroturfing, I literally explained why it's not only not astroturfing but also why it's not grassroots either
- I didn't say SpaceX is bad because Musk is bad, I said that the kind of enthusiasm demonstrated by that website is surprising now (hence the accusations) but that it wouldn't have been surprising a mere few years ago
- You shouldn't idolize corporations because they're literally built to generate profit for themselves and any externalities that work out to your benefit are merely a nice side-effect and shouldn't be taken for granted no matter what their marketing copy or true believer employees say
- Elon Musk is a terrible person and seems to work best as a hype man and ideas guy but is neither a good engineer nor a good business person; his public behavior only serves to satisfy his desperate need for personal reaffirmation and harms his companies and their mission statements more than it helps them
- Starlink is a cool piece of infrastructure but it should be deeply concerning that this infrastructure is controlled by not only a for-profit company but effectively one very self-absorbed billionaire who seems to be prone to snap judgements that can literally affect state military performance (just imagine he'd be a Russian oligarch or South Korean or something if "South African / Canadian / US citizen" feels less concerning to you).
This is a bizarre accusation to make.
Just because it's not a company you agree with doesn't make this any less of a grassroots/fan project.
Some folks see 3000 data points laying around somewhere and just want to create something fun with it.
This is one of the dumbest takes i have seen on HN in a while.
For real. The trolls that are so unnerved at Elon need to get out from under their bridge and enjoy some sunshine.
Or it could simply be a very enthusiastic fan.
Yep, just a fan of the mission and have some friends on the team (and needed another statistic to fill out the bottom lol).
It’s a fun site to look at!
Thanks for putting together the visualization.
Creator seems to be a frenetic builder of things: https://depue.notion.site
You don't need an affiliation with a company to mindlessly parrot it's marketing material.
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?
They have a lifespan of about 5 years, the limit is the amount of maneuvering propellant to compensate for atmospheric drag they have on board. Next gen, which will be launched by the much larger Starship, may have a lot more propellant.
Most are in a five year orbit. This means that if SpaceX loses control of the satellite it will deorbit in five years due to atmospheric drag. Under control they deorbit within hours. They plan on switching to a one year orbit in the future.
They have purposefully deorbitted hundreds of satellites. They had a couple of early satellites deorbit naturally without control, but all starlinks currently orbiting are under control.
Starlinks are designed to burn up in atmosphere. On deorbit they do not reach the Earth.
I imagine Starlinks are like other Musk products and get updates multiple times per month, but that's a guess.
If they send them farther out does that increase their lifespan due to thinner atmosphere? Why target 1 year instead of five year?
Yes, higher orbits would have increased lifespan, a little bit longer for satellites under control and likely decades longer for satellites out of control.
I think the primary motivation for lower orbits would be compatibility with cellular telephones. While they have gotten it to work at current altitudes, it must be a lot easier at lower ones.
Other reasons could be decreased latency, less overlap/interference between coverage areas, reduced chance of Kessler syndrome, decreased power usage for transmission & reception.
Having them as low as possible improves latency, which is a big selling point of Starlink over incumbent geostationary services like Hughesnet.
Since the satellites are in zero gravity will they continue to be in orbit forever?
Or do satellites need some power to continue to stay in orbit?
If satellites can deorbit without power what forces would cause that?
There's wisps of atmosphere where they are. The drag causes them to slow down, which lowers their orbit. Then they hit thicker air and get more drag and go lower yet. And then they get so hot from all the friction the cook to bits.
Oversimplified.
Yup. There's not much atmosphere way up there, but if you hit it at 17,000 miles per hour even a little bit can be significant!
Hey bryanlarsen, as a request could you not post things like this that are confidently incorrect?
They had a couple of early satellites deorbit naturally without control, but all starlinks currently orbiting are under control.
A trivial check at any online database would find that there are many not under control. And satellites also still deorbit naturally without control pretty regularly.
Thank you! This is very interesting to read. I'll have to do some more research myself.
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.
I don't quite understand your second reason. Could you elaborate what you mean by "dwell over our province" which would explain improved coverage beyond the fact that there are as you said probably fewer subscribers the satellites are visible from?
Starlink has a lot of (most?) satellites at an orbital inclination of 53 degrees to avoid "wasting" time over the poles where few people live while still providing coverage at most other latitudes. This means that at any time there's a higher density of satellites above that latitude than at the equator.
Here's a map of the ISS orbit (similar inclination) over time which shows the effect: https://engaging-data.com/pages/scripts/iss/iss3.png
That was very helpful. Clicking on a few satellites and looking at their orbit confirms that. The majority do not go over the poles. Interesting that this also leaves northern Canada, Denmark and Scandinavia with what looks like not much coverage but at the same time there's coverage offered [0] in all those regions.
There's probably always going to be issues with getting good coverage of Scandinavia economically because (1) the physics of the orbits means that regions at the same latitude (both Northern and Southern hemisphere) "share" the satellites to an extent and (2) Scandinavia is an outlier in population density at its high latitude. In other words, there are not many other high-latitude countries with which to share the cost of the putting satellites in these inclinations orbits. I believe this is ameliorated somewhat by the US Military's desire for pole-to-pole coverage. I think (?) the near-polar orbit Starlinks were only added later because of this.
I don't think so. As per sat cost goes down, you can add a few sats on a specific polar orbit that covers that area perfectly. Japan uses that kind of polar orbit.
Are you talking about QZSS? That's a Tundra-style geosynchronous orbit, not a polar orbit. Such orbits are much too distant from Earth's surface for them to be usable with Starlink.
Any idea why there is such a discrete separation between the near-polar orbits and the 53-degree orbits? Naively I would have thought that there would be several classes orbits with degrees ranging from ~0 to ~90, with the number in each chosen so that coverage roughly matched the subscriber distribution.
I think you misinterpreted. Parent poster probably was thinking "fewer subscribers per Earth sq km", but mostly it turns out to be "more satellites per sq km".
This is really cool but what's with the borderline propaganda in the sidebar interlaced with the data?
Agreed. Internet to the whole world is a noble goal, but the internet provider in chief is, in my estimation, a ghoul. The gushing praise is a strange choice to be sure, considering how informative the rest of the site is.
The gushy-ness of the webpage is weird, but note it does not mention Musk at all. It only discusses Starlink and SpaceX.
It is imo even more cringe to be so overtly gushy about a corporation.
Linking to the jobs page of a company you don't work for is quite strange, yes.
Why is there such a sudden drop off in satellite density over 53°N ?
Satellites launched in a polar orbit only cover polar areas. It's more cost effective to design orbits with more area and customers under them.
Polar orbits cover the entire Earth, like all other low orbits, in fact, they cover more than any other orbit. And there are people up there: all of Northern Europe and Alaska, and most of the UK, Russia and Canada.
I am sure there is a good reason, but it surprised me too. I expected more polar orbits, like Iridium.
Most of the population lives below 53 deg. It makes sense to put the satellites there instead of having them bunch up near the poles. They also have 70 deg planes that cover most population centers. In future, they are planning planes at 42 and 48 deg that can better cover lower latitudes.
Canadian customs.
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.
The default visualization speed is 16x real time.
Oh, so it is, (I see now 'live' is available by clicking on that option (top right). Thanks for the correction.
For near-circular orbits like this, speed controls altitude [0] [1]. 600,000km/hr is way faster than Earth escape velocity, so anything that fast won't be orbiting Earth.
[0] https://science.howstuffworks.com/satellite6.htm
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_speed#Tangential_veloc...
Interesting. What library is that? Does it use propagation off from TLE data?
From eyeballing the JS, it looks like it's pulling TLEs from Celestrak and doing SGP4
Thank you!
yep that's right. uses https://github.com/shashwatak/satellite-js.
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.
Part of that is because starlink shells are lower down than many other satellites. You are never going to have a GPS satellite or a GEO stationary one be the nearest to you because there is always going to be lower satellites nearer.
Yes, I eventually had it give answers for each of LEO, MEO, and GEO just because it got extremely boring having "STARLINK" almost always be the answer.
Wow, that's really cool, could you share it? I would use that all the time.
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?
United Kingdom 450 is a count not because the UK actually launches so many satellites of its own, but rather because legacy commercial telecom operators (geostationary like INMARSAT and others) are often UK incorporated. Dig deep enough into commercial satellite telecom and you'll find stuff with offices in the City of London.
Why did many telecom companies put their offices in the City of London?
Taxes, US regulation, military shenanigans?
Yep, they should be.
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.
Bringing certainly would be. Selling, however...
Not sure I understand - you expect some one/some company to invest billions and billions of dollars to create internet access in places that where it doesn't exist and then give away the service?
Who would, or could, do that?
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?
No. There are over a billion road vehicles on Earth, but they do not change how the Earth appears from space (even accounting for the fact that ~half are blocked by clouds at any given time). A few tens of thousands of Starlink satellites will not change the Earth's visual appearance.
I know the dots seem large in the visualization, but these satellites are approximately the size of cars. They're specks of dust at this scale.
not optimized for mobile use... is best enjoyed on a desktop
Please rotate your device to landscape for the optimal satellite viewing experience.
Ummm...
They seem to be merely detecting the aspect ratio of the browser window, and their message is equating portrait to mobile, even on the desktop. When I made my desktop browser window wider than tall, it got past that imperfect check they're using.
Yes they are, I just found it an amusing juxtaposition. Also perhaps a little unforgiving, given that I had a roughly square viewport which was definitely not a problem.
What happens when there are half a dozen startups with 42,000 satellites around earth?
Lots of space up there, no pun intended.
I don't think startups will be able to enter this market, at least not any time soon - it's too capital intensive. We might get several large "constellations" someday though (Starlink, Eutelsat/OneWeb, Amazon Kuiper, Guowang).
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...
I was about to comment in agreement while also mentioning about having a means to put the hardware up there. But then I realized that there's absolutely no reason why they couldn't just pay SpaceX to put them up there (until Blue Origin is up to the job). SpaceX has put a few Amazon payloads into orbit already.
SpaceX has little reason to thwart any competition since it's just creating more demand for their services, thus in theory helping to reduce the cost of putting mass into orbit, funding future efforts and further solidifying their position as the industry leader.
Not that SpaceX could/would thwart competition since it would be met with a great deal of pressure from the gov.
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.
By default, it's set at 16x speed (top-right on desktop)
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.
I remember seeing that their ultimate goal is in the 30,000 region.
When applying for permits, it makes sense to vastly overshoot your actual goal, it gives you negotiation reserves.
Does Starlink work in Norway or Alaska?
I would never have guessed Starlink had this many satellites.
Yes. But there are much less of the sats.
There is basically a line at a certain latitude where the density of population is highest. So must sats circle between between that area.
But to cover the things further north (or south) respectively, SpaceX also has sats in polar orbit. Those allow for coverage from the poles to the max latitude.
There is also https://satellitemap.space/
That’s a good one
Also check out
https://satellitetracker3d.com/
For a 3d visualization of Starlink as well as many other (all other?) satellites.
Be sure to zoom out
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.
Starlink.sx is really great and has a lot of data I haven't added yet. Working towards getting coverage hexagons + ground stations + more asap.
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.
And if the satellites were represented as panda bear emojis?
Even when I dont like Musk he did what Google tried for years
He's a good example of how an awful person with awful opinions can still somehow do cool stuff.
Really, he's just surrounding himself with great people, clearly.
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.
Great suggestion. I'll add this as soon as I get the time. Being able to color code each shell would be super cool.
I want a realtime version of this for my lockscreen! Very impressive.
Seconded. If the author consider adding an option, they may get some additional stream of income:D
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.
It looks just like that one scene in End of Evangelion.
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.
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.
This one has been around for ages, and it does work on mobile too.
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.
The first 60 Starlink satellites launched in May of 2019[0].
Just use Starlink.sx
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.
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 prefer https://satellitemap.space/
You can see the base station locations there, which is helpful in visualizing how the system works in various locales.
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.
That sounds like an absolute distopian nightmare and the last person on earth that I want to be running this service is Elon Musk. In general I find it horrendous how a single american company can pollute the night sky for every human being in the world, whether they can use their services or not. Technologically I'm in awe of what Starlink achieves, it's an incredible feat - and yet I still think it's a travesty that it's allowed to exist at all.
Have you seen them in orbit?
I look at the sky regularly in a low light area and I've not seen any "pollution", but maybe I don't know how to look?
I can spot the satellites (sometimes) if I look up at night, but it's not like I see anything more than a bunch of dim lights beaming across the sky. So I don't think that counts as light pollution
There are plenty of satellites visible to the naked eye, not just Starlink ones.
I remember as a kid (far before Starlink existed) that we'd always go stargazing when we were camping (far from any city light pollution). And the longer you'd watch, the more you would see 'stars move'.
The ISS is also very clearly visible. It's pretty wild to see it re-appear every 90 minutes or so. Insane to think how fast that thing is moving.
I was walking my dog a few months ago right after dusk and randomly saw the starlink train, it was a linear constellation marching across the entire sky, from horizon to horizon, and lasted at least 2 minutes.
It was both amazing and disturbing.
The "train" is only visible for a week or two after launch. Once the satellites get to their operational orbits they are not visible. So you'll never see the thousands of satellites that are up there; they can't possibly ruin your view of the night sky.
I have actually! At night you can see the "train" of satellites when the light reflects off them just at the right angle - it's like a long line of dots across the horizon. Of course that is nothing compared to what problems this is causing for astronomy.
Yes. They are only visible after launch, like a string of slow shooting stars or pac man food that lasts 3-4 minutes.
After they reach their target orbit they go into dark mode and you will never see them unless you operate like a top 10 in the world telescope.
That pollution is much much less than the light pollution from cities and aircraft (both visual and noise).
If we’re going to care about pollution of the night sky it seems more effective to take on those cases that are already very intrusive.
You missed the point I was making - it's not about absolute amount of pollution, it's about the fact that Musk's company is polluting the sky for every single human on earth, despite the fact it does not provide their service for everyone on earth. People in many countries around the world now have to deal with his swarm of sattelites to look at the sky, because of an American billionaire's fantasy. That doesn't seem fair to me.
The international space treaty allows all countries to launch sats. People in the US and Musk have to look at Sats that Russia, India and Iran launched as well. Its a shared resource.
99.9999% of human who live have never seen a Starlink sat so this pollution is really not all that crazy. In fact most people find it interesting when they accidentally see one.
Also sats have been visible since literally 70 years, and many are more visible then Starlink.
The problem is that these satellites pollute the night sky in exactly those areas that are currently not polluted by other sources. So if you go to an International Dark Sky Place to do astrophotography, you end up with a whole bunch (technical term) of little Starlink dots / lines all through your images.
Agree that fixing broader light pollution is a separate and important issue.
Given that Musk was the only person with the ambition, capital, and ability to deliver such a project, you're basically saying that you'd rather have Starlink not exist at all than to have Musk in charge.
Confirmed: You'd rather have every Starlink customer go dark than have someone you've been told to dislike provide those customers with a service they willingly sign up for.
Dystopia, indeed.
No, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying having Musk in charge makes it distopian, but even without him at the helm I'd rather it didn't exist.
No, I'd rather not have my sky polluted to satisfy an American billionaire's fancy, even if he has willing and paying customers. The night sky is a common good of every single person on earth, and he's playing with it to make money. I'd have the exact same complaint about any competing constallation, and in fact I am going to have it because Amazon is building a competing service themselves.
But that good shouldn't to serve millions of people with something they need.
You rather have it totally unused instead at all.
I have bad news for you because there are about 10 other major constellation in development and those are only the ones that are a public.
Not a single country has put major effort into stopping it.
Pretty much every country agrees that this space should be used to serve the needs of its people.
Being overly dramatic just makes you sound silly.
Except of course that with the visible eye you never even see Starlink and 99.99% of humanity has never seen a single sat, and don't notice it. And of those who have most have seen a short bus of sats for a few seconds. And somehow those people are still alive.
The sky is fine and not polluted.
There are some concerns about earth based astronomy but they are often overblown. And sats are just one of many things humans do that make astronomy harder.
More regulation to take into account astronomy make some sense, but SpaceX has been a model citizen in that regard.
A single company and cheaply are usually mutually exclusive as competition is what keeps prices down.
They're not mutually exclusive as far as cost goes - quite the opposite (hence all the talk about "synergy" and "vertical integration" in enterprise spaces) - but you're right about consumer prices. I think what's keeping the consumer prices for Starlink down is that for the vast majority of its coverage it does have competition.
Much like how it's in Tesla's best interests for the US not to invest in high-speed rail (hence Musk's "Hyperloop" stunt to prevent an infrastructure investment), it's in Starlink's best interests for countries not to invest in broadband technologies (whether it's mobile networks or fiber). I'm not aware of any plans to dissuade governments from those investments yet but I wouldn't be surprised to see it. Presumably Musk is too busy with Twitter at the moment.
Im already seeing an impact. Rural wifi networks are being replaced by starlink, at least for those able to afford it. Starlink is certainly faster to setup and maintain, but remains far more expensive day to day than a rural wifi net.
I have family on a rural network with solar-powered relays setup on islands. New retirees to the area are just buying starlink without even asking about the local net. So it is no longer being expanded to new locations/islands. The new people also dont want relays on thier land. They dont support the local/cheap option it because they have been sold starlink by whatever off-grid company is setting up thier new cabin.
But is local option really cheap?
From my experience it is quite the opposite: they know you have nowhere else to go so you will buy their connection anyway.
That depends on the service. Many rural wifi nets serve less than a few hundred customers and rely on the good will of landowners to allow stations on their land.
Much depends on geography. In the flat areas of the midwest there are tall towers serving expansive areas. Those are the ones with licenses and local monopolies. But in rough or mountainous terrain the net requires lots of little relay stations and is done using non-licensed 2.4ghz spectrum. Those small companies remain friendly because they know anyone can jump in and compete. The one my family is on relies on a chain of relays on islands to connect a couple villages to a local cell tower location where there is fiber. Everyone knows the cell service is bad and there is no wired internet. So when the relay stations need fixing, boats and skilled labor show up to help get the town back online.
It seems like starlink is a perfect option for this type of situation.
I'm sure if you factor in the costs of this plus the nontangible costs of downtime, Starlink is far superior, even if it is more expensive.
The San Juans?
Close. BC coastal area.
Has your family tried talking to any of them about it?
To be clear: I'm arguing monopolies can increase efficiency so they can cause costs to go down but they also eliminate the motive to pass those cost savings on to customers so they usually cause prices to go up. This is well-known enough to be a key part of the strategy of "disruptive" companies that grow by pricing out the competition at a loss and then ramp up prices later (e.g. Amazon, Uber, etc).
The US is notorious for its lack of competition in local broadband providers but this is less true for other countries. So while Starlink may disrupt local monopolies of higher prices and worse quality in some places, especially in the US, in the long term it's rational to expect them to aim to replace the monopoly, not to continue having to compete.
Given the site guidelines discourage voting based on agreement, I wonder what part of what I say is so fundamentally wrong and counter-productive it's not even worth responding to and actively detrimental to the conversation.
Is it that I say that monopolies can increase efficiency (e.g. Apple making their own chips and having their own stores)? Is it that companies often disrupt industries by pricing out competition at a loss before hiking prices? Is it that US broadband providers often operate in effective monopoly positions? Is it that Starlink can be disruptive to those monopolies? Is it that it's rational to expect SpaceX to want to be the new monopoly rather than being stuck in permanent competition?
Heck, I literally use Starlink because cable wasn't available and I didn't want to pay for copper until we'll be connected to fiber hopefully later this year. I'm not arguing Starlink isn't useful to consumers in the short term or that there aren't legitimate use cases that can't be equally served by other existing technologies. That doesn't mean there aren't obvious problems with it.
Nobody was investing in rural fiber beforehand either. Try managing your EDS.
Global service doesn't mean no competition...
is referring to the service area, not the number of competitors.
I suspect the country borders problem will never get resolved. Even now, starlink is only available in US-allied countries.
Apparently it's active in Iran (because the US government wants it to be.)
SpaceX worked with the state department to enable it. It happened during the Iran protests. So it's more like the state department allowed any US connectivity provider to provide service in Iran.
But you CAN reduce amount of borders ;)
Ask Russia how that's been going ;)
Elon has already stated that Starlink is not a replacement for a quality wired/fiber connection. His goal with Starlink is to cover areas that aren't covered by ISPs for whatever reason.
I once read about a gas station chain that used VSAT for credit card processing because it's faster than POTS and they didn't have to deal with different local telcos/ISPs. I'm not sure how true that is, but for some low-bandwidth uses I can see the appeal of having a single national/worldwide ISP.
Yeah, that completely makes sense. The comment I was thinking of was made in the context of Starlink for home users.
By the way, I think that comment was from the 2023 SpaceX all-hands talk that was posted online if you wish to find it yourself.
I work in manufacturing/logistics and lots of facilities have starlink.
With all software in the cloud now (e.g. WMS) losing connectivity can cause a facility to stop, so having an entirely segregated line on an entirely separate technology platform is worth a lot. Lots of production/warehouse facilities struggle to get truly redundant lines to them, and often are sitting outside of 4G range.
Google Fi is uncapped, global, free roaming. Probably some countries don't work but so far ~30/30 for me.
I live abroad for long periods of time, and went from T-Mobile to Mint for my US number. It's $75 per 3 months once you pass the discounted intro period. I also get a local SIM card, and I just use Mint via WiFi calling. It has been working well for me.
Sounds interesting, but it appears to be available only in the US, and the international roaming only works for 90 days, so I don't think it really qualifies for "without bothering about new contracts, moving cities or country borders"
I'm wondering it this is even technically possible because of bandwidth? There is many more mobile cell towers worldwide - all they are big, connected to power grid, connected internet with fiberoptic, much closer to users but such one tower can still struggle to handle traffic during peak times when many users are connected.
Density, I'd imagine. Some cell towers are serving hundreds of thousands of people individually. It seems on average the satelites are serving 400-500 on average.
AFAICT that's exactly what Starlink is trying to do. Their satellites are in a low enough orbit to provide sufficient bandwidth for light web browsing, and they certainly have enough satellites to provide reliable coverage (by satellite standards).
Thing is, satcom is still much more expensive, much slower, and much more power-hungry than what folks have gotten used to with broadband home internet, LTE, and 5G. I have the feeling that it will always be that way - it takes a lot more power to blast a signal into space than it does to send it to a tower down the street, or to the router in your living room. The section of the general population that is willing to make such huge tradeoffs in exchange for truly global coverage is quite small. Militaries and certain types of businesses love it, though.
You already can.
Tons of people driving the Pan-American Highway from Alaska to Argentina are using Starlink now - it works flawlessly no matter what country you're in.
Same for people driving around Africa, across Central Asia, etc.
Pro Tip - order it in a country like Mexico and the monthly fee is way lower.