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Comment by dylan604 | Hacker News Reader

My real estate doesn't move though. So while maybe applicable to a GEO stationary orbit, it doesn't really fit LEO oribts.

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Orbits themselves don't move, they're time-invariant (short term, but so is the ground). Six numbers are all it takes to define an orbit; if you put something on it, it stays there and blocks it off - like building on a plot of land.

pedants going to pedant. objects in orbits move so that you can have multiple objects in the same orbit. you can't do that with real estate. they have the opposite with time shares where there's one object that different people get to use at different times. there is no real estate where for a portion of the day it is one building, but then it is a different building later.

this is the entire basis of timeshare real estate. it's not that hard to see how the metaphor holds up, dude.

Also, I hate to break it to you, but your homes are spinning around the earth's axis once a day (at the same rate as a geosynchronous satellite, in fact!)

Anyway, Starlink wants to scale up to 42,000 satellites. I can't imagine that's anywhere close to the maximum number that could fit in their altitude range. After all, if arranged in a grid, that's just ~ 200 x 200 satellites. The earth's surface area is many orders of magnitude larger than that, and the satellites are occupying a larger (and much thicker) orbital shell.

dude, that's exactly what i said. better context reading before going off with dude bro comments perhaps?

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