Marcus House
@MarcusHouse · Jan 1, 2026
Wow! That is a significant decrease in altitude. If I am understanding this right it should mean
- Less chance of debris collision
- Sightly lower latency
- More drag on the sats to reduce their life time in orbit.
The increased drag may seem bad, but I imagine this is simply
Michael Nicolls@michaelnicollsx· Jan 1, 2026Starlink is beginning a significant reconfiguration of its satellite constellation focused on increasing space safety. We are lowering all @Starlink satellites orbiting at ~550 km to ~480 km (~4400 satellites) over the course of 2026. The shell lowering is being tightly
Elon Musk
@elonmusk
Biggest advantage of lower altitude is that beam diameter is smaller for a given antenna size, allowing Starlink to serve a higher density of customers
05:26 AM · January 2, 2026 · 196.4K views
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