Starlink by the numbers
SpaceX's Starlink is the largest satellite constellation ever flown — a fleet of thousands of spacecraft in low Earth orbit, tracked in the public catalogue and visible from the ground as bright moving points of light. Here is the constellation as it stands right now, from current public orbital data.
What is Starlink?
// the facts, not the pitchStarlink is SpaceX's satellite internet constellation. Unlike a handful of large geostationary satellites, it uses thousands of small spacecraft in low Earth orbit (LEO) — mostly around 550 km altitude — to beam broadband to ground terminals worldwide. The design trades the high latency of geostationary links for much shorter round trips, which is what makes it viable for real-time use.
It is the largest fleet in space history. The public satellite catalogue now lists more than eleven thousand active Starlink objects, launched in batches of dozens per Falcon 9 flight. Every one of those objects is a separate tracked satellite, and the constellation keeps growing as new batches are deployed and older units are deorbited at the end of their service life.
It changed how we track space. Before Starlink, the vast majority of catalogue objects were debris and dead hardware. Now, active operational spacecraft outnumber everything else — and their orbits are publicly available as orbital element data, which is what this site plots. The constellation is also a visible phenomenon: shortly after a launch, the satellites travel in a bright "train" across the night sky until they spread into their operational orbits.
It is not without controversy. The sheer number of satellites has raised questions about light pollution, collision risk in LEO, and crowding of the most useful orbital bands. Starlink spacecraft are designed to lower their altitude at end of life and burn up in the atmosphere — and the public record shows those reentries happening regularly, which is part of what we track here.