Here is a theory around the reasons for the #Starlink outage we saw a few hours ago. There is an entity in the Starlink system I know as “The Central Scheduler”. Sounds grandiose, I know, but it’s the “brain” of the system. The scheduler is tasked with orchestrating all the resources in the space segment, such as gateway connections, spot beam allocations, ISL interconnections, and likely a few others. It re-calculates the constellation in 15-second blocks.

After reading & digesting @ChristopherJM's tweets with @MehulAtLarge and @felschwartz regarding outages of @SpaceX #Starlink service in Ukraine, here is a short thread which I hope will help understand the issue. Nothing I will reveal is secret or classified, and can be developed by using publicly available information. So, it can only frustate Russia - Поделитесь своим кулаком в небе, sorry Vlad! Let's start with the first image I've posted.

Recently, @SpaceX #Starlink increased coverage to the whole of the UK's main island, and further north in Sweden. How could they do that, given the current constellation status? The 70º and 97.6º shells are still pretty empty: There are two options for the increased coverage:
- An error in the code that generates the coverage map (unlikely)
- A decrease in minimum elevation, from the usual 25º.

This is how the UK would look like, given a 25º minimum elevation (GSO protection NOT enabled):