Musk in March 2022: in 18 months there will be over 4,200 Starlink satellites in orbit. There were 4,823
Elon Musk28 March 2022 · Twitter post
«Starlink 🛰 team too! Expecting over 4200 Starlink satellites in operation within 18 months, which is ~2/3 of all active satellites of Earth.»
Eighteen months later, on 28 September 2023, 4,823 Starlink satellites were in orbit, up from 2,110 on 28 March 2022.
Fact: Jonathan McDowell, General Catalog of Artificial Space Objects (GCAT), satellite catalog
That was the count exactly 18 months later. At the end of 2022 there were 3,373; at the end of 2025, 9,388.
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Starlink is SpaceX’s satellite internet: thousands of small satellites in low orbit. In spring 2022 Elon Musk wrote how many there would be in a year and a half. Here is how many satellites of the network were actually in orbit.
First the words: who said it, when and where, verbatim (translations are ours). Answer Yes or No, or just open the answer: the stamp is the outcome, below it what came of it. On the timeline the small dark dot is when it was said, the empty ring the deadline, the ring in the stamp’s colour when it happened; a line in that colour along the axis is the delay, a dashed line to «not yet» means it has not happened by today.
- Elon Musk, Twitter post quote
«Starlink 🛰 team too! Expecting over 4200 Starlink satellites in operation within 18 months, which is ~2/3 of all active satellites of Earth.»
- What happened came true
Eighteen months later, on 28 September 2023, 4,823 Starlink satellites were in orbit, up from 2,110 on 28 March 2022.
Jonathan McDowell, General Catalog of Artificial Space Objects (GCAT), satellite catalog
Promise: Elon Musk’s post on Twitter, 28 March 2022. Fact: Jonathan McDowell’s General Catalog of Artificial Space Objects (GCAT, planet4589.org): satellites launched and not yet decayed on the date. Outcome: «came true» — the promised number reached by the deadline («about» within 5%), an event happened before the end of the year promised; «exceeded» — with room to spare; «nearly» — short by no more than 10%; «late» — reached, but after the deadline; «did not come true» — not reached; «came true, then undone» — reached, then reversed. The deadline is the end of the year named.
Musk spoke of working satellites; the catalogue counts all in orbit, including failed ones and those still raising their orbit. The margin over the promise is about 600 satellites, more than the non-working ones could account for.
A question for this picture
How many satellites does a network need in orbit for internet everywhere on Earth?