Starlink Guides
Starlink is easy to describe in one sentence and surprisingly deep once you start pulling on any part of it. Why does it need thousands of satellites when older systems needed three? Why do satellites vanish halfway across the sky? What is actually inside the block of numbers a tracking site uses to know where everything is?
These 20 guides answer those questions properly rather than in a paragraph — roughly 22,000 words of explanation, written to be read by someone who has never thought about orbital mechanics and wants to understand what they are looking at tonight.
Start here
What Starlink is, how it compares with what came before, and whether you can actually get it.
What Is Starlink? A Plain-English Guide
Starlink is SpaceX's satellite internet network. How it works, why it needs thousands of satellites, what is actually on board each one, and how your dish finds them.
7 min readStarlink vs Traditional Satellite Internet: What's Actually Different
Why Starlink feels nothing like the satellite internet people remember — the physics of orbit height, what changes for latency, speed, weather and cost, and where the old systems still win.
5 min readIs Starlink Available in My Area? How Coverage Really Works
Why Starlink availability is about ground capacity rather than satellites overhead, what a waitlist actually means, how the service tiers differ, and how to check your own address.
5 min readStarlink Speed and Latency, Explained
What actually determines your Starlink speed and ping — the physics floor, the shared-capacity ceiling, why performance changes hour to hour, and which problems you can fix yourself.
6 min read
Seeing it yourself
Finding Starlink satellites in your own sky — when to look, what you are looking at, and why they vanish.
How to Track Starlink Satellites in Real Time
A practical guide to following the Starlink constellation live: reading the 3D globe, understanding elevation and azimuth, using pass predictions, and knowing what the numbers actually mean.
6 min readCan You See Starlink Satellites From Your House?
When Starlink satellites are visible to the naked eye, why the timing is so specific, how to tell one from an aircraft, and what light pollution and latitude do to your chances.
6 min readThe Starlink Train: What It Is and How to See One
Why freshly launched Starlink satellites fly in a bright line across the sky, how long the effect lasts, why it disperses, and how to time your attempt to catch one.
5 min readWhy Starlink Satellites Disappear Mid-Pass
The satellite was bright, tracking perfectly across the sky, and then it faded to nothing in a few seconds. Here is the geometry behind Earth's shadow, and the other reasons a pass ends early.
5 min read
The satellites
Hardware generations, how long a satellite lasts, and what happens when one reaches the end of its life.
Starlink Satellite Versions Explained: v0.9 to V3
Every Starlink generation, what changed between them, and why — from the 227 kg prototypes of 2019 to the laser-linked V2 Mini and the Starship-sized V3.
6 min readHow Long Do Starlink Satellites Last?
Why Starlink satellites are designed for about five years, what actually wears out, why a short life is deliberate rather than a flaw, and what it means for the constellation's launch cadence.
5 min readWhat Happens When a Starlink Satellite Dies
How a Starlink satellite is deliberately removed from orbit, why it burns up completely, what happens when one fails before it can be deorbited, and the open questions about re-entry at scale.
5 min readStarlink V3 and Why It Needs Starship
The V3 satellite is too big for a Falcon 9 — and that constraint explains the whole design. What changes with a much larger satellite, why aperture is the limiting factor, and what it means for constellation capacity.
5 min read
The network
Orbital shells, laser crosslinks, ground stations, and how a phone talks to a satellite.
Starlink's Orbital Shells Explained
Why the Starlink constellation is organised into distinct shells at set altitudes and inclinations, what inclination does to coverage, and how to read the shell structure in live orbital data.
6 min readHow Starlink's Laser Links Work
Optical inter-satellite links let Starlink route data through space instead of bouncing it off the ground. How the lasers acquire and hold a target, why light is faster in vacuum than in fibre, and what the crosslinks made possible.
5 min readStarlink Direct to Cell: A Phone Tower in Orbit
How Starlink satellites talk to ordinary unmodified mobile phones, why Doppler shift is the central engineering problem, what the service can and cannot do, and why it will not replace your mobile network.
5 min readWhere Your Starlink Data Actually Goes
Follow a packet from your dish to the wider internet — the gateway antennas, the points of presence, why gateway capacity is often the real bottleneck, and what CGNAT means for your connection.
5 min read
Data and context
The orbital data behind every prediction, and where Starlink sits alongside astronomy and rival constellations.
What Is a TLE? How Satellite Tracking Actually Works
Every satellite's position comes from a small block of numbers called a two-line element set. What a TLE describes, why it only works with one specific algorithm, and how accuracy decays with age.
6 min readHow to Read a TLE, Line by Line
A complete walkthrough of a real Starlink two-line element set — every field, what it means, the implied decimal points and compressed exponents, and how to check a line has not been corrupted.
5 min readStarlink and Astronomy: The Real Conflict
Why satellite constellations interfere with astronomical observation, what SpaceX has done about brightness, why radio astronomy is the harder problem, and where the dispute genuinely stands.
6 min readStarlink vs Kuiper vs OneWeb: How the Constellations Differ
Three large satellite internet constellations with three different strategies. Orbit heights, satellite counts, target customers, and why the design choices are not really competing on the same axis.
5 min read
Want the practical version instead? Check tonight's visible Starlink passes over your city, or see which satellites are above you right now.