ONE LAUNCH. THE WHOLE JOURNEY.
Start where you stood. Follow the rocket. See what the satellites do next.
BEFORE LAUNCH
Surf station is about 5.7 km north of SLC-4E. The beach, coastline and low hills put the launch in context.
Starlink fleet · launch-time prediction.
They don’t switch on as a finished network at release. They separate, check out, raise their orbits and move toward operational positions. The exact slots or service gaps assigned to this batch aren’t established by the data here.
Starlink orbital predictions use the saved mission launch reference time and the October 29 CelesTrak snapshot.
Local terrain: USGS 3DEP, 33 × 33 elevation samples, approximately 300 m spacing, retrieved October 29, 2026. Hills are exaggerated 3×; buildings and rocket symbols are enlarged. Terrain is not a surveyed line-of-sight or beach-access assessment.
Globe texture: Solar System Scope, CC BY 4.0, 8K Earth day map. Satellite symbols and separation distances are enlarged for readability.
Aerial imagery: Esri, Vantor, Earthstar Geographics, and the GIS User Community. Imagery is not live. Surf station coordinates are approximate. User reference videos were inspected locally and are not published.
The 3D view uses one Earth and a continuous illustrated route from the fixed Vandenberg pad. The same upper stage carries the batch to release; booster landing is a separate offshore inset, not a location on the beach map. Flight, deployment, orbit raising and insertion of the new batch are illustrations, not live telemetry or confirmed orbital slots. The existing fleet uses the CelesTrak Starlink GP snapshot downloaded October 29: 11,132 public orbital records, propagated with SGP4 to the saved mission launch reference time. Element epochs vary; this is not live GPS or a census of satellites providing service. The catalog is bundled and does not refresh itself automatically. Amber points represent the planned batch, not confirmed satellite positions.
Fleet snapshot: Jonathan McDowell, October 29, 2026, 01:44 UTC: 11,190 in orbit; 10,022 in operational orbits. “In orbit” does not mean every spacecraft is providing service. Adding 27 is a gross illustration, not a forecast net of retirements.
Launch schedule and event plan: Launch Library 2. The illustration uses the saved Starlink 15-18 scheduled target: October 30, 2026 at 8:48 p.m. Pacific (October 31, 03:48 UTC). This is not a confirmed actual liftoff time. The reference is frozen; the page does not poll a live schedule. This page plays a guided story, not a live rocket tracker.
Deployment model: Lessons Learned on Mega-Constellation Deployments (2023) describes passive stack separation using angular momentum. The close-up simplifies that general method; it is not footage or a reconstruction of this mission.
Orbit raising: Starlink space-safety documentation. The final chapters compress a process taking days to weeks or longer, rather than displaying an exact mission schedule.