3 ms·
> the surface area of a sphere at LEO is substantially larger than the surface area of the earth. I don't know the exact numbers, but I know it's a huge differe
by dmurray 8y ago
> the surface area of a sphere at LEO is substantially larger than the surface area of the earth. I don't know the exact numbers, but I know it's a huge difference.
The surface area of the sphere is not much bigger, LEO starts a few hundred km up compared to the Earth's radius of thousands of km. Maybe 1.5x the surface area. But it expands in 3 dimensions: if the interesting part of LEO is 500km thick and a satellite takes up 10m of it from bottom to top, that's 50,000 concentric Earth-surfaces.