The altitude ladder
Earth Orbit Altitude Bands: VLEO to Graveyard
From skimming the atmosphere to standing still over one spot.
Orbits are ranked by altitude, and almost everything else — velocity, period, radiation, how long a dead satellite lingers — follows from that one number. The two Van Allen belts are included in place because they are not operating regimes but the reason the operating regimes sit where they do.
| Regime | Altitude | Orbital velocity | Period | What operates there | Decay & disposal |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Very Low Earth OrbitVLEO | 250–450 km | ~7.8 km/s | ~90 min | High-resolution imaging and reconnaissance. Lower altitude buys sharper optics and cheaper launch, paid for in drag. | Days to months; active propulsion required to stay up |
| Low Earth OrbitLEO | 450–1,000 km | 7.6–7.8 km/s | ~90–105 min | The workhorse band. Crewed stations, the large broadband constellations, most Earth observation, and the launch market’s primary destination. | Years to decades; the 25-year disposal rule applies |
| Upper LEO— | 1,000–2,000 km | ~7.1–7.4 km/s | ~105–127 min | Sparsely used. Sits at the lower edge of the inner Van Allen belt, so most operators avoid it. | Decades to centuries; effectively permanent without disposal |
| Inner Van Allen belthazard band | 1,000–6,000 km | — | — | Not an operating regime — a trapped-proton radiation zone crossed quickly, not parked in. Defines the gap between LEO and MEO. | — |
| Medium Earth OrbitMEO | 2,000–35,586 km | 3.9–6.9 km/s | 2–24 h | Position, navigation and timing constellations — GPS, Galileo, GLONASS, BeiDou — sit near 20,000 km, threading between the two radiation belts. | Centuries; disposal to a dedicated MEO graveyard |
| Outer Van Allen belthazard band | 13,000–60,000 km | — | — | Trapped-electron radiation zone. PNT constellations sit in the quieter slot between the belts by design. | — |
| Geostationary Transfer OrbitGTO | ~250 × 35,786 km | 1.6–10.2 km/s | ~10.5 h | Not a destination — the elliptical staging orbit spacecraft use to climb from LEO to GEO before circularising. | Varies with perigee; low-perigee GTOs decay in years |
| Geostationary OrbitGEO / GSO | 35,786 km | 3.07 km/s | 23 h 56 m | The fixed-slot band. Communications, broadcast, weather, and missile-warning satellites that must hover over one longitude. | Effectively permanent; disposal to the graveyard above |
| Graveyard Orbitdisposal / junk | ~36,086 km~300 km above GEO | ~3.06 km/s | ~24 h | Where GEO satellites are boosted at end of life to clear the operational arc. The outer edge of this regime — nothing operational lives here. | Permanent by design; the terminal parking band |
Velocities are circular-orbit values; elliptical orbits (GTO, Molniya) vary between perigee and apogee. Altitudes are conventional band edges, not hard boundaries.
How to read it
How Orbital Altitude, Velocity, and Period Relate
Three numbers do most of the work.
Altitude sets velocity, and velocity sets period. Lower is faster: a VLEO imaging satellite laps the planet in 90 minutes at nearly 7.8 km/s, while a GEO satellite matches Earth’s rotation exactly at 3.07 km/s and appears to hang motionless. Everything between is a smooth trade along that curve.
The two radiation belts carve out the usable bands. Operators cluster in LEO below the inner belt and at GEO above the outer one, with the PNT constellations threading the calmer slot near 20,000 km. The belts are why MEO is narrower in practice than its altitude range suggests.
Decay is the hidden axis. In VLEO the atmosphere pulls hardware down in months, so staying up costs propellant. By GEO there is no meaningful drag and a dead satellite stays forever — which is why disposal stops being optional and the graveyard orbit exists at all.
Special-geometry orbits
Special Orbits: Sun-Synchronous, Molniya, Tundra, and Polar
Not higher or lower — shaped differently.
Some orbits are defined by the geometry of their plane or their eccentricity rather than by altitude alone. They sit inside the bands above but do a job the circular version cannot.
| Orbit | Parameters | What makes it special | What flies there |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sun-Synchronous OrbitSSO | 600–800 km, ~98° inc | A LEO tuned so its plane precesses with the Sun, crossing every latitude at the same local solar time. | Imaging and climate monitoring that need consistent lighting on every pass. |
| Molniya Orbit— | 500 × 39,900 km, 63.4° inc | A highly elliptical 12-hour orbit that loiters for hours over high latitudes at apogee. | High-latitude communications GEO cannot serve, and early-warning coverage. |
| Tundra Orbit— | 24-hour, ~63.4° inc, elliptical | A geosynchronous cousin of Molniya tracing a figure-eight ground track over one region. | Regional communications and navigation augmentation. |
| Polar Orbit— | LEO, ~90° inc | Passes near both poles, so the whole surface rotates beneath it over successive orbits. | Global imaging, reconnaissance, and weather. |
| Near-Rectilinear Halo OrbitNRHO | cislunar, about EML-2 | Not an Earth orbit at all — a balanced path around a lunar libration point. Included as the boundary where this regime hands off. | The Gateway station; the doorway from Earth orbit to cislunar space. |
Where the regime ends
The Graveyard Orbit and the Edge of Earth Orbit
The graveyard is the edge of the map.
This regime is bounded, and its boundary is a disposal rule, not a physical wall. A satellite that finishes its life in GEO is boosted about 300 km higher into the graveyard orbit to clear the operational arc, and there it stays. Everything above that — the transfer to a libration point, the run out to the Moon — belongs to cislunar space, the next regime out.
The one place the boundary genuinely blurs is inbound supply. A lunar mass driver could one day deliver material into these orbits from above rather than lifting it from below — the mass driver is native to the Moon, but its customer is here. That corridor, when it exists, is the one that reprices the whole regime.