Which is why you get things like this https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/05/satellite-firm-planet-labs-t...
An aircraft carrier is not that fast, if you see it once you know roughly what radius of circle it is going to be in for a while (ignoring the fact that they are likely going somewhere for a reason its not their job is to say out of sight)
edit: aha that company literally lists it on their website https://www.planet.com/industries/maritime/
Beirut doesn't move around a lot. Carriers do. While there are a lot of satellites pointing at the earth at any one moment, this isn't some kind of Hollywood super screen showing a real time image of the entire pacific. You just see whatever small patch the satellite happens to be pointing at.
And again, ignoring the part where america would probably start shooting down satellites.
Do you seriously think China doesn't track US carrier movements?
How would they avoid having a Chinese satellite continuously track their movement? They have the capability to do that, there is nothing USA can do about it except shoot down all the Chinese satelites.
https://defencesecurityasia.com/en/china-three-satellites-tr...
I mean, you can try all you want, but there's limits to hiding a fleet of ships on the open sea. They are huge, emit immense heat signatures, and produce miles-long wakes while moving. As long as there are satellites overhead, they will be able to find them.
I suspect we might be talking past one another because we have different degrees of precision in mind: I'm not saying the Chinese could have a missile target lock on a carrier whenever they wanted, much less in wartime. Far from it. But I highly doubt you can reposition a carrier group without them catching wind of it within hours.
It's not impossible to track a carrier group via satellites, but it's not trivial either, you can't just, like, open up your windows gui and click on a satellite and click the button that says "follow this carrier" because like satellites orbit and fly around the earth and the ships can alter course when you don't have eyes on them and so on and so forth.
And yeah, as you point out, there's a big difference between having a satellite picture showing a probable carrier group at X and Y coordinates and being able to actually strike the thing.
Never mind that the Starlink radio arrays are, well, radio arrays that quite effectively cover the whole planet. If you think of each satellite as a radio telescope, its resolution is crap and probably cannot disambiguate a carrier group from anything else (at least according to disclosed specs). But it would be quite interesting to build a synthetic aperture array out of multiple satellites. This would rely on emissions from the ships themselves, but I bet it could be done and could locate ships quite nicely.
Carrier groups also don't emit radio when they aren't interested in being detected!