[Plutoberth]

Starlink roughly orbits at 1200km. The most common orbit for internet sats is geostationary orbit, which means that the satellite is stationary with regards to an observer on Earth. It works because a satellite on a circular orbit at that height moves at the same speed as the rotation of Earth.

This way you can have a simple, pointed antenna and not an obscenely expensive phased array like Starlink. That being said, GEO is only 36000km,so I'm not sure where the "60 times" figure comes from...

[twicetwice]

Starlink currently orbits at 550 km. 550*60=33000 so that puts it slightly more than 60 times closer than GEO. There are other shells planned at different heights, but the current satellites, and ones launched in the near future, are all orbiting at 550km.

Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink -- in the table of launches there's a column for orbit height.

[40four]

It still sounds so wild for some reason! 60X closer!

You’re saying these and other satellites are planned for this ‘shell’ and maybe others at different distances? Could this be partly due to congestion and the problem of ‘space junk’?

Also, won’t satellites in an orbit this close to earth eventually be ‘sucked’ in to the atmosphere and burn up?

[Plutoberth]

Right - thanks for the correction.

[nickik]

They are orbiting at 550 km, 1200km was the original constellation plan that was later changed.