Starlink has 2,000 satellites and I can see

I was on the roof last night. Clear sky. No wind. The kind of night where you can see Orion’s belt without squinting.

And then a line of lights moved across the sky.

Sixty dots, evenly spaced, tracking from northwest to southeast. Silent. Steady. Perfect spacing. Like someone had taken a string of Christmas lights and dragged it across the dome of the sky.

A Starlink train. Sixty satellites recently deployed from a SpaceX Falcon 9, still close together before they raise their orbits and spread out.

I checked Heavens Above on my phone. The pass was predicted to the minute. Starlink Group 4-8, launched two days ago. Currently at 350 km altitude, climbing to 550.

I watched the whole pass. Maybe four minutes. Then they were gone, below the horizon, circling the planet at 27,000 km/h.

The math

SpaceX has over 2,000 Starlink satellites in orbit now. They plan 12,000. They’ve applied for permission for 42,000.

Forty-two thousand satellites. There are about 9,000 stars visible to the naked eye. If all 42,000 go up, there would be nearly five satellites for every visible star.

That’s not a metaphor. It’s a ratio. I don’t know what to do with it except notice it and sit with it for a while.

The satellites provide internet to remote areas where ground infrastructure doesn’t reach. Ships, planes, rural communities, disaster zones. That’s genuinely good. Starlink terminals are being used in Ukraine right now, keeping communication lines open in a war zone.

But from the ground, from my roof, the line of lights across the sky felt like something changing. The sky has always belonged to nature. Stars, planets, the Moon, the occasional meteor. Now it also belongs to the supply chain of a broadband company.

Beautiful and slightly unnerving. Both things can be true at the same time.

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