‍Why Don’t Stationary Satellites Fall?

‍Some awkward questions for a stationary Earth

  Gary Hoge  ·  October 9, 2026

‍Imagine looking through a telescope at GOES-19, an American weather satellite some 22,000 miles above Earth’s equator. Night after night, you find it in essentially the same spot in the sky. It just hangs there, seemingly motionless.

‍How does it do that?

‍The answer is surprisingly simple. The satellite isn’t motionless at all. It’s traveling around Earth at nearly 7,000 miles per hour. But it takes exactly the same amount of time to complete one orbit as Earth takes to rotate once on its axis—23 hours, 56 minutes, and 4 seconds, to be precise. Here’s what its orbit looks like:

‍Consequently, GOES-19 keeps pace with Earth’s rotation and remains directly above the same spot on the equator. If we plot its movement relative to Earth’s surface, its path—called a ground track—is little more than a dot:

‍But what if Earth doesn’t rotate? What if, as geocentrists maintain, Earth remains motionless while the entire universe revolves around it?

‍Now we have an interesting problem. If Earth is physically stationary and the satellite remains above the same spot on Earth, then the satellite must be physically stationary, too. It’s just hanging there.

‍And that raises an obvious question: What’s holding it up?

‍Orbiting or levitating?

‍A satellite stays in orbit because of two things: its forward motion and Earth’s gravitational attraction.

‍If the satellite were in deep space, far from significant gravitational influences, it would continue moving in a straight line. But Earth’s gravity continually pulls it toward the planet, bending its path into a circle. The satellite is constantly falling toward Earth, but its forward motion causes it to keep missing the ground.

‍That’s all it takes to keep a satellite in orbit. Once it’s been placed in the proper orbit, it doesn’t need an engine constantly pushing it along. It’ll glide along for decades, minding its own business.

‍But if the satellite is genuinely motionless above a physically stationary Earth, that explanation no longer works. Earth’s gravity is still pulling it downward, and without orbital motion or some other supporting effect, it would fall.

‍So why doesn’t it?

‍Satellites do have small rocket engines that periodically fire to correct their positions. But if those engines were continually firing to hold the satellites up against gravity, assuming they were even powerful enough to do that, they would quickly exhaust their fuel. Yet satellites can remain in orbit for decades, even long after they’ve run out of maneuvering fuel.

‍So, again, what’s keeping it up there?

‍That’s a question geocentrism needs to answer. But GOES-19 is only the beginning. Other satellites at approximately the same altitude trace remarkably different paths across Earth’s surface, raising some even more interesting questions.

‍Some weird ground tracks

‍What happens if we change the orbit slightly?

‍Consider TDRS 3, a NASA communications satellite launched in 1988 on Space Shuttle Discovery. Its ground track is a figure-eight:

‍What kind of orbit produces a ground track like this? Surprisingly, it’s almost the same as GOES-19’s orbit. The principal difference is that TDRS 3’s orbit is significantly inclined relative to the equator. As the satellite circles Earth, it travels alternately north and south of the equator. And because its east-west motion doesn’t quite match Earth’s rotation throughout the orbit, its ground track also shifts east and west. The result is a figure eight.

‍TDRS 3’s orbit is also slightly elliptical, which introduces additional variations in its speed and modifies the shape of the figure eight. A satellite like this one, whose orbital period matches Earth’s rotation, is called geosynchronous. If it also remains above the same location, like GOES-19, it’s called geostationary. Here’s what its orbit looks like:

‍Are figure-eights the only patterns satellites can trace out over the ground? Oh, no, there are others. Consider LDPE-2, an experimental satellite that’s in a somewhat higher orbit than TDRS 3 or GOES-19. Its ground track looks like this:

‍Its orbit is also inclined, but it’s slightly larger than those of the first two satellites. That means it takes a little longer to complete each revolution around Earth. Consequently, Earth turns a little farther during each of the satellite’s revolutions, so its ground track gradually drifts westward. Combine that drift with the satellite’s regular movement north and south of the equator, and you get a zigzag pattern, like a pen on a seismograph. Here’s what its orbit looks like:

‍Notice what’s happening here.

‍We haven’t introduced any new forces. We haven’t changed the laws of physics. We’ve simply given three satellites different orbits.

‍One remains almost stationary above the equator. Another traces a figure eight. A third follows a drifting zigzag.

‍All three patterns follow naturally from the same laws of orbital mechanics. Their differences are consequences of orbital inclination (the tilt of the orbit relative to Earth’s equator), eccentricity (how elliptical the orbit is), and period (how long it takes to complete an orbit).

‍And those differences aren’t merely explanations invented after observing the results. They’re predictable from the satellites’ orbital characteristics.

‍Now stop the Earth

‍Now suppose Earth really is stationary. What happens to these satellites’ ground tracks? Nothing. These aren’t arbitrary patterns that disappear when we change our assumptions about Earth’s motion. They represent the satellites’ actual positions relative to Earth’s surface, positions that can be checked by observation.

‍But if Earth is stationary, that means that GOES-19 is essentially hanging motionless above the equator. TDRS 3 moves north, south, east, and west, tracing a figure eight. And LDPE-2 follows a zigzag that gradually moves westward around the planet.

‍So how do geocentrists account for these motions?

‍We’ve already encountered the first problem. If GOES-19 is motionless above a stationary Earth, what prevents Earth’s gravity from pulling it down?

‍The other two satellites present additional difficulties.

‍What keeps TDRS 3 from falling, and what makes it move north and south of the equator, reversing direction twice during each cycle, while also moving east and west to complete its figure eight?

‍And what keeps LDPE-2 aloft while it oscillates north and south and steadily drifts westward, producing a regular zigzag?

‍Why do these motions have the periods, amplitudes, and directions that ordinary orbital mechanics predicts for satellites moving around a rotating Earth?

‍And these are only three examples. Any satisfactory explanation must also account for satellites in low Earth orbit, satellites passing over the poles, and the Moon, with their vastly different distances, velocities, and orbital periods.

‍If Earth rotates, all these motions follow from the same familiar laws of physics and are easily explained by variations in the satellites’ orbits. We don’t need a different explanation for each satellite.

‍But if Earth is physically stationary, what corresponding laws account for them?

‍Naming it doesn’t explain it

‍In my exchanges with geocentrists, I’ve noticed a recurring pattern. When I raise a physical objection, the response is often to invoke some phenomenon—frame dragging, the Lense–Thirring effect, gravitational forces from the distant stars, electromagnetic fields, or a rotating ether—as though naming it were sufficient to explain the problem.

‍For example, when I challenged Catholic geocentrist Robert Sungenis to explain the different ground tracks of three satellites, he attributed their motions to “the forces of oscillation and inclination produced by a rotating star system.”¹ But he offered no explanation of how a rotating star system would cause Earth-orbiting satellites to oscillate or follow inclined orbits. He simply asserted that the rotating stars would produce the required effects.

‍That’s the recurring difficulty. It’s one thing to name a physical phenomenon that might conceivably account for an observation. It’s another to explain how it would do so, and quite another to provide equations demonstrating that it actually predicts the observed results. In these exchanges, I haven’t seen even the conceptual explanation, much less the calculations.

‍There’s an irony here, too. Sungenis has appealed to the Lense–Thirring effect, derived from Einstein’s general relativity, despite having previously written that relativity theory was “an absolute farce.”² But even setting that inconsistency aside, invoking a relativistic effect doesn’t demonstrate that it produces the satellite motions geocentrism requires.

‍And when every objection is answered by proposing whatever unproven forces or physical properties would be necessary to make geocentrism work, we have to ask whether geocentrism is really a conclusion being drawn from the evidence, or a premise being protected from it.

‍__________

^‍1 Robert Sungenis, remarks reproduced in “Challenge: A Debate on Geocentricity,” p. 83, https://www.ldolphin.org/geocentricity/Aspects.pdf. See also Gary Hoge, “Dialogue on Looping and Zig-Zagging Satellites (Part 1),” Catholic Outlook, https://catholicoutlook.me/dance1.html.

^‍2 Robert Sungenis, remarks on relativity and the Lense–Thirring effect, “Challenge: A Debate on Geocentricity,” pp. 79, 133–134. See also Gary Hoge, “Dialogue on Looping and Zig-Zagging Satellites (Part 5),” Catholic Outlook, https://catholicoutlook.me/dance5.html.