When a photoelectric device can not track the satellite due to the changed intersection angle of the sun or the orbit blocking, the satellite orbits have to be predicted. Because the traditional orbit prediction method based on orbit elements can not meet the requirements of real-time and precision measurement simultaneously, this paper proposes a new satellite orbit prediction method based on orbit elements. The movement rule of satellite orbits was analyzed, then the elliptic curves were used to predict the satellite orbits and to process approximately the orbit equation based on the characteristics of a low orbit satellite. Some redundancy variable quantities were induced to simplify the calculation model for satellite orbit, so that the orbit prediction accuracy is greatly increased in guaranteeing a good real-time calculation. The experiments show that when the linear extrapolation is used to predict the satellite orbit, its prediction deviation will increase to 10″ after 5 s forecasting. However, if the method presented in this paper based on the orbit elements is used in the prediction, the maximum deviation is not more than 2″after 50 s prediction. The method has greatly promoted the prediction precision of satellite orbit, and makes the photoelectric device implement the 'blind tracking' for satellites when the automatic tracking is become to be invalid.