Hey everyone, welcome back to My Weird Prompts. I am Corn, and I am sitting here in our living room in Jerusalem with my brother.
Herman Poppleberry, at your service. It is a beautiful morning here, Corn. I think the light hitting the Old City walls right now is just spectacular.
It really is. Though, honestly, I spent most of my morning looking at a different kind of light. Or at least, thinking about the things that reflect it. Our housemate Daniel sent us a voice note earlier today that really got me down a rabbit hole. He was asking about the massive shift we are seeing in satellite technology. Specifically, this move toward Low Earth Orbit, or LEO, and how it compares to the traditional, high-altitude satellites we have relied on for decades.
Daniel always has a knack for picking topics that are right on the edge of a massive industrial transition. And he is right to be curious. We are living through the single most significant change in how humanity uses space since the late nineteen fifties. It is not just about more satellites. It is about an entirely different philosophy of how we occupy the sky.
That's it. And I think we should start with the basics because the scale of the difference in altitude is actually mind-blowing when you see the numbers. When Daniel mentions conventional satellites, he is usually talking about Geostationary Earth Orbit, or GEO. Herman, give us the breakdown. Just how much of a gap are we talking about here?
It is massive, Corn. Think of it this way. If the Earth were the size of a basketball, a Low Earth Orbit satellite would be hovering about half an inch above the surface. That is roughly two hundred to two thousand kilometers up. Most of the constellations Daniel mentioned, like Starlink or Amazon's Project Kuiper, live in that five hundred to six hundred kilometer range. But a conventional geostationary satellite? On that same basketball scale, it would be about twenty-two feet away.
Twenty-two feet versus half an inch. That is a staggering difference.
It really is. In actual numbers, geostationary orbit is exactly thirty-five thousand seven hundred eighty-six kilometers above the equator. The reason that specific number matters is physics. At that altitude, the time it takes for a satellite to orbit the Earth matches the time it takes for the Earth to rotate once on its axis. Twenty-three hours, fifty-six minutes, and four seconds.
So, from our perspective on the ground, the satellite looks like it is just sitting still in the sky.
That's right. That is why you can point a satellite dish at a fixed spot in the sky and never have to move it. If you are watching satellite television or using an older satellite internet service like HughesNet or Viasat, you are talking to a bus-sized machine that is parked thirty-five thousand kilometers away.
Okay, so that sets the stage. Low Earth Orbit is close and moving fast, while Geostationary Earth Orbit is far away and appears stationary. Now, Daniel's big question was about cost. Is it actually cheaper to launch and operate these Low Earth Orbit satellites? Because on the surface, it seems like you need way more of them.
That is the big trade-off. To answer Daniel's question: yes, individual Low Earth Orbit satellites are significantly cheaper to build and launch, but the total system cost can be enormous because of the sheer volume. Back in the day, a single geostationary satellite could cost five hundred million dollars to build and another one hundred million to launch. They were these bespoke, gold-plated, school-bus-sized behemoths designed to last fifteen or twenty years because you only got one shot.
Right, because if it breaks thirty-five thousand kilometers away, there is no way to fix it.
That's right. But with Low Earth Orbit, we have moved into the era of mass production. Companies are building satellites on assembly lines now. A Starlink satellite might only cost a few hundred thousand dollars to manufacture. And because they are so much lower, you can hitch a ride on a rocket like the Starship system, which is now launching regularly and carrying over one hundred satellites at once. The launch cost per satellite has dropped through the floor.
But there is a catch with the operation side, isn't there? I mean, these things don't last twenty years.
Not even close. In Low Earth Orbit, there is still a tiny, tiny bit of atmosphere. It is very thin, but it creates drag. Over time, that drag pulls the satellite down. To stay up, they have to use on-board thrusters to maintain their altitude. Once they run out of fuel, or even before that, they are designed to de-orbit and burn up in the atmosphere. Most Low Earth Orbit satellites only have a lifespan of five to seven years.
So it is a disposable model. Instead of one giant, permanent station, you have a constant conveyor belt of smaller, cheaper satellites being launched and retired.
You got it. It is the difference between building a massive, permanent bridge versus running a fleet of thousands of small ferries. The ferries are cheaper individually, but you have to keep building new ones to replace the old ones.
That brings us to the functionality. Daniel asked if there are things Low Earth Orbit satellites cannot do. If Low Earth Orbit is so much cheaper to launch, why do we even bother with the high-orbit stuff anymore? There has to be a reason we haven't just deprecated geostationary orbit entirely.
There are several very big reasons. The first is coverage area. One geostationary satellite can see about forty percent of the Earth's surface. If you put three of them in the right spots, you have global coverage, excluding the extreme poles. To get that same continuous coverage with Low Earth Orbit satellites, you need hundreds, if not thousands. Because they are so low, their footprint on the ground is tiny. They zip over the horizon in minutes.
So if I am a broadcaster and I want to send a television signal to an entire continent, a single Geostationary Earth Orbit satellite is actually much more efficient than trying to hand off that signal between a thousand moving Low Earth Orbit satellites.
Spot on. For broadcast, Geostationary Earth Orbit is still king. It is also the gold standard for weather monitoring. If you want to see a hurricane developing over the Atlantic, you want a camera that stares at that exact spot twenty-four seven. A Low Earth Orbit satellite would only see that hurricane for a few minutes every couple of hours. You would get a series of snapshots rather than a continuous movie.
That makes a lot of sense. What about the signal itself? I know latency is the big talking point when people compare Starlink to old-school satellite internet.
Latency is the killer app for Low Earth Orbit. This is just pure physics, the speed of light. To send a signal to a geostationary satellite and back, the data has to travel about seventy-two thousand kilometers. Even at the speed of light, that takes about two hundred forty milliseconds. By the time you account for the return trip and processing, your ping is over five hundred milliseconds.
Which is why gaming or high-frequency trading is impossible on old satellite tech. You click, and half a second later, the server hears you.
Right. But at five hundred kilometers in Low Earth Orbit, the round trip is only about three milliseconds. Even with the overhead of the network, you get latencies of twenty-five to thirty milliseconds, which is comparable to fiber optic cables on the ground. That is why Low Earth Orbit has completely disrupted the internet market. It is not just better for satellite internet, it is competitive with ground-based internet.
So we have this divide. Low Earth Orbit is for high-speed, interactive data where latency matters. Geostationary Earth Orbit is for staring at things and broadcasting to wide areas. But Daniel asked a provocative question: do we envision a situation where high-orbit satellites are eventually deprecated? If we get really good at managing these massive Low Earth Orbit constellations, does Geostationary Earth Orbit become a ghost town?
I have thought a lot about this, and I think the answer is no. In fact, I think geostationary orbit is becoming more valuable, not less. We are seeing a trend toward what people call hybrid architectures. Instead of picking one or the other, the military and big telecommunications firms are using both.
How does that work in practice?
Well, imagine you are a naval ship in the middle of the Pacific. You use your Low Earth Orbit connection for your day-to-day operations, video calls, and real-time data because it is fast. But you keep a Geostationary Earth Orbit connection as a backbone. Geostationary Earth Orbit satellites are much harder to jam because they are so far away, and they provide a stable, persistent link that doesn't rely on complex hand-offs between thousands of moving targets.
That is an interesting point. I hadn't considered the complexity of the network. With Low Earth Orbit, the satellite you are talking to right now will be gone in five minutes. Your ground station has to constantly find and track the next one.
That's the key thing. It is a massive networking challenge. You need sophisticated phased-array antennas that can steer beams electronically. In geostationary orbit, your antenna is just a static dish. It is simple, it is reliable, and it works. I think we will see Geostationary Earth Orbit satellites move toward being these high-capacity data hubs or secure command and control nodes, while Low Earth Orbit handles the heavy lifting of consumer data.
It is like the difference between a massive, slow-moving cargo ship and a fleet of delivery drones. You need both for a functioning economy.
That is a great analogy. And we shouldn't forget about Medium Earth Orbit, or MEO, which sits right in the middle, around twenty thousand kilometers. That is where most of our Global Positioning System and navigation satellites live. They found a Goldilocks zone where they are high enough to cover a large area but low enough that the signal is still strong and the timing is precise.
I am glad you brought up Global Positioning System, because that leads into the other part of Daniel's prompt. He wanted to know what else satellites are doing up there besides internet and surveillance. Because we talk about those two a lot, but the sky is actually much busier than that.
Oh, the diversity of roles is incredible. Beyond Global Positioning System and the other Global Navigation Satellite Systems like the European Galileo or the Russian Global Navigation Satellite System, one of the most vital functions is environmental monitoring. We have satellites specifically designed to measure the height of the ocean surface down to the millimeter. We have satellites that track methane leaks from pipelines in real-time.
I remember reading about the Grace satellites. They measure gravity, right?
Yes! The Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment. It is actually two satellites that follow each other. As the lead satellite passes over something with more mass, like a mountain range or a dense ice sheet, the extra gravity pulls it slightly ahead. By measuring the distance between the two satellites very precisely, they can map the Earth's gravity field. They have used this to track how much ice is melting in Greenland and Antarctica. They can literally weigh the ice from space.
That is phenomenal. It is basically a giant scale in orbit. What about the retrograde orbit thing Daniel mentioned? He noted that Israel is the only operator that launches into a retrograde orbit. For those who don't know, most satellites are launched toward the east to take advantage of the Earth's rotation, right?
That's correct. It is like a free speed boost. The Earth is spinning at about sixteen hundred kilometers per hour at the equator. If you launch east, you get to add that speed to your rocket. But here in Israel, if you launch east, you are flying over some very sensitive neighbors. If the rocket has a failure, you don't want one hundred tons of burning fuel landing on a populated city in a neighboring country.
So we launch west, out over the Mediterranean.
Right. It is incredibly inefficient from a physics standpoint. You are fighting against the Earth's rotation, which means your rocket has to be much more powerful to carry the same payload. But it is the price of geography. It is a very Jerusalem solution to a space-age problem.
It really is. It is a reminder that even in orbit, geopolitics still dictates the rules. Now, let's talk about the numbers. Daniel asked how many are up there currently. And since we are in early two thousand twenty-six, those numbers have been climbing at an exponential rate.
It is getting crowded, Corn. As of right now, in February two thousand twenty-six, we are looking at roughly thirteen thousand five hundred active satellites in orbit. To put that in perspective, in two thousand nineteen, there were only about two thousand.
So we have more than sextupled the number of active satellites in just seven years.
Most of that is Starlink. They have over eight thousand satellites in orbit on their own now. And with the recent successful high-cadence launches of the Starship system, that number is going to keep skyrocketing. We are looking at a future, maybe by two thousand thirty, where there could be fifty thousand or even one hundred thousand active satellites.
That brings up the big what if scenario. If we have one hundred thousand things zipping around in Low Earth Orbit, what happens when they hit each other?
You are talking about the Kessler Syndrome. This is the nightmare scenario proposed by National Aeronautics and Space Administration scientist Donald Kessler in one thousand nine hundred seventy-eight. The idea is that the density of objects in Low Earth Orbit becomes so high that a single collision creates a cloud of debris, which then hits other satellites, creating more debris, in a runaway chain reaction.
And eventually, you end up with a shell of shrapnel that makes space travel impossible.
That's the fear. You wouldn't be able to leave the planet. Now, the good news is that modern Low Earth Orbit satellites are designed to be much more responsible. They have automated collision avoidance systems. They talk to each other. If two satellites are on a collision course, they can nudge themselves out of the way. And as I mentioned, they are designed to burn up at the end of their lives.
But that only works if the satellite is still functioning. If it goes dark and loses power, it becomes a multi-ton bullet that we can't control.
That is the big worry. There are already millions of pieces of debris up there that are too small to track but big enough to destroy a satellite. A piece of paint traveling at thirty thousand kilometers per hour can hit with the force of a hand grenade.
It is a classic tragedy of the commons. Everyone wants the benefits of the orbit, but nobody wants to be responsible for cleaning it up.
There is some progress there, though. We are starting to see space tugs—small satellites designed specifically to grab onto dead satellites and pull them down into the atmosphere. Companies like Astroscale are actually making this a viable business model.
I want to circle back to the functions for a second. We talked about internet, surveillance, weather, and gravity. What about scientific research? Are we seeing more mini-labs in orbit?
Definitely. This is one of the most exciting second-order effects of cheap Low Earth Orbit launches. It used to be that if you wanted to do a microgravity experiment, you had to beg for space on the International Space Station. Now, you can buy a CubeSat slot or even use an automated factory like the ones built by Varda Space Industries. They are doing pharmaceutical manufacturing in orbit.
Pharmaceutical manufacturing? Like, making medicine in space?
Yes. They are doing protein crystallization experiments because crystals grow more perfectly without gravity. This allows them to create more stable versions of drugs for things like cancer or immune disorders. They launch a small capsule, it stays in orbit for a few weeks while the medicine cooks, and then it de-orbits and lands back on Earth.
So space is becoming an extension of our industrial infrastructure, not just a place for flags and footprints.
That's the orbital economy. We are even seeing the first prototypes of space-based manufacturing for high-end fiber optics. ZBLAN fibers, which are much clearer than standard silica fibers, are almost impossible to make on Earth because gravity causes tiny defects. In Low Earth Orbit, you can pull a fiber that is theoretically one hundred times more efficient.
That is the kind of thing that makes the high cost of launch worth it. If you can create a product in space that is physically impossible to make on Earth, the economics change completely.
And that is why I don't think we will see a deprecation of any orbit. Instead, we are seeing a specialization of orbits. Low Earth Orbit is the industrial park and the high-speed data network. Medium Earth Orbit is the global clock and map. Geostationary Earth Orbit is the high-security backbone and the watchful eye for the climate.
It feels like we are building a multi-layered shell around the planet. Each layer has its own purpose, its own physics, and its own economy.
It is a beautiful way to look at it. But it does mean we have to be much better neighbors. When you share a house, like we do with Daniel, you learn that you can't just leave your stuff lying around in the hallway. Space is the ultimate hallway.
That is a perfect transition, Herman. Because while we are talking about these grand orbital systems,
