That's interesting to see with knowing that just a fraction of the planned constellation is there. That's a lot of dots already. I'm guessing that the few visible string of dots are more recent launches that haven't quite reached their final positions yet. That's also interesting to see how long it takes the train to not be a train any longer, while at the same time showing how frequently new launches have been occurring.

I believe the constellation is about 90-95% complete now. The first shell at least. There's plans for more shells but that's for redundancy, not coverage.

I was going to comment about how surprised I was that they almost finished the first shell without deploying laser links but apparently they have: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/01/space...

I think the laser interlinks are proving more difficult than SpaceX anticipated. I had expected them much earlier in the deployment than now, and it seems they are currently only planning them for polar orbits.

I think they need quite a lot of satellites in polar orbits to get coverage at the poles, and they have barely launched any yet. They are close to 100% coverage of the rest of the world already though.

They're doing polar launches but compared to the number of customers in sub-70 latitudes it's a pretty small market.

Well, 9/10 is still a fraction, just not as small as I thought it was. ;-) I must have fallen behind on launches, not realizing they were this far along.

That is a lot redundancy. Current satellite count is around 1,600, and FCC approved plans through phase 2 would bring that up to ~12,000

Is that really how many Starlink satellites are up there? Foo. I had no idea.

What are the dense lines of satellites?

At least for the short lines, they're launched in batches from one point, so they take some time to spread out to their final orbits. These are neat to view after a launch.