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by twicetwice 1953 days ago
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.

2 comments

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?

Right - thanks for the correction.