This Starlink question came to me after I had given up on trying to find how many commercial aircraft were flying above my head at that very moment. I’ve always been curious about where the flights passing overhead were actually headed. At first glance, this question doesn’t seem difficult to answer. There are several APIs—OpenSky, AviationStack, and ADS-B Exchange—that provide real-time aircraft state data in JSON format. In theory, all I needed to do was write a short Python script to fetch this data, define my location and an observation radius, and then connect this backend to a clean, visually appealing Node.js interface.
The problem? No matter how long I searched, I couldn’t find a free API that allowed continuous integration. And since paying subscription fees to answer every random question that crosses my mind isn’t exactly sustainable, I had to rethink.
So what do you do when your project hits a dead end because no viable solution exists? You change its scope. Instead of tracking aircraft, why not take it one step higher—literally? Rather than relying on paid APIs, I decided to use publicly available orbital data. All satellites in Earth orbit are tracked by NORAD using the Two-Line Element (TLE) format. A TLE encodes the key orbital parameters of a satellite, which can be used to mathematically propagate its position and velocity at any given time. This position can be projected as ground track to get latitude and longitude. Conveniently, Python already has libraries that can handle this computation. Starlink was picked solely as part of a numbers game. I wanted to verify, for myself, the sheer dominance of Starlink in LEO. So I fetched TLE data for every Starlink satellite, simulated their orbits, and added my home latitude and longitude as a reference point. Now, the next time someone asks how many satellites specifically Starlinks are flying overhead, I can proudly open my little app, give them an exact answer and ruin family dinner.
