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Why can't they have satellites orbiting over the north or south poles? Can anyone ELI5 this?

• rtkwe 5y ago
  They could but there aren't many people up there to sell to so they cut down the coverage to save a lot of money on the number of satellites they need to launch.
• sudhirj 5y ago
  They can, but I don’t think they want to, that would waste satellites on a very low population circle. Think of each orbit as a hula hoop around the earth. You’d want to pack as many hoops as you can over the populated areas, with maybe one or two to provide the basic level of service required to the poles.
• 16bytes 5y ago
  They technically can, but then you'd have those satellites spend a ton of their time over nearly unpopulated areas doing nothing. If you instead launch at about a 60 degrees inclination, you spend all of your time between N60 latitude and S60 latitude where it's a lot more populated. This lets you have more coverage in populated areas with fewer satellites. Additionally, there's no satellite to satellite link capability yet, so for an uplink to work you need a base station in range for the satellite to talk to (you can see these as a "wifi" symbol on the map). It's too expensive to put base stations pretty much anywhere in the artic.