SWARM
STARLINK, ONEWEB & THE MEGACONSTELLATIONS
In 1997 Iridium needed 66 satellites to cover the whole Earth.
BEGIN — CHAPTER 01 →A triumph of engineering over common sense
Iridium: 66 satellites, six planes, 780 km.
Iridium and Globalstar went bankrupt; Teledesic never flew.
Iridium survived its bankruptcy.
Footprints and streets of coverage
Minimum elevation sets the footprint.
Honeycomb bound and streets of coverage.
Iridium's 8.2° minimum elevation [21].
Thousands of satellites for capacity, not coverage
13,015 launched, 11,154 in orbit, 9,726 operational [9].
Capacity, cells and lasers [11].
Starlink shells [10].
Low orbits clean themselves.
38 of 49 lost to a storm [12].
Low orbit beats geostationary — and sometimes glass
GEO ≈ 477 ms round trip; Starlink 25.7 ms median [13].
Lasers beat fibre beyond ~3,000 km [14].
Coordinates rounded; GEO from Kepler's third law.
The rest of the race
OneWeb, Amazon Leo.
China's Guowang and Qianfan.
Counts as of 15 October 2026.
What astronomers see
Earth's shadow and McDowell 2020 [18].
Rubin: 30 s, 9.6 deg², magnitudes 4.5 → 7 [19][20].
Rubin midnight presets.
Radio interference [22][23].
Both problems grow with numbers.
A dodge almost every week, for every satellite
207,152 manoeuvres in six months [24].
More than 40 per satellite per year [24].
From bankruptcy to eleven thousand satellites
Covering the Earth takes dozens; serving everyone takes thousands.