Starlink Loses 40 LEO Broadband Satellites to Geomagnetic Storm

SpaceX appears to be licking some extremely expensive wounds today after the company revealed “up to” 40 of the 49 Starlink broadband satellites that it launched to Low Earth Orbit (LEO) on 3rd February 2022 will soon be toast, thanks to the impact of a pesky geomagnetic storm.

At present Elon Musk’s risky venture has around 1,900 LEOs in orbit and their initial plan is to deploy a total of 4,425 by 2024. Customers in the UK typically pay a hefty £89 a month, plus £54 for shipping and £439 for the kit (dish, router etc.). But for that you can expect unlimited usage, fast latency times of 20-40ms, downloads of c. 50-250Mbps and uploads of c.10-20Mbps (such figures will change as the network grows).

The company has been launching new Starlinks at a fair old rate of knots for the past couple of years, but they haven’t always gone according to plan, and some LEO platforms do fail (e.g. until today 132 had been disposed of and 36 have entered an early deorbit). But it looks as if the latest launch on the 3rd February has taken a particularly big hit.

Falcon 9’s second stage is stated to have deployed the 49 satellites into their intended orbit, with a perigee of approximately 210 kilometres above Earth, and each satellite achieved controlled flight. But shortly after that the same train of LEOs was struck by a geomagnetic storm, which caused the atmospheric drag on them to “increase up to 50 percent higher than during previous launches.” In short, they’ll end up being dragged back down to be vaporised in the Earth’s atmosphere.

Magnetic storms typically occur when intense solar wind interacts with Earth’s magnetosphere, which is the magnetic field that exists around our planet and helps to protect us from a lot of nasty solar and cosmic particle radiation. But this interaction, which spawns shifting currents and plasmas, can also cause the atmosphere to warm a little and atmospheric density to increase. Such things can be problematic for newly launched LEOs, which need to raise themselves high enough post-launch to stay in orbit.

SpaceX Mission Statement

SpaceX deploys its satellites’ into these lower obits so that in the very rare case any satellite does not pass initial system checkouts it will quickly be deorbited by atmospheric drag. While the low deployment altitude requires more capable satellites at a considerable cost to us, it’s the right thing to do to maintain a sustainable space environment.

Unfortunately, the satellites deployed on Thursday were significantly impacted by a geomagnetic storm on Friday. These storms cause the atmosphere to warm and atmospheric density at our low deployment altitudes to increase. In fact, onboard GPS suggests the escalation speed and severity of the storm caused atmospheric drag to increase up to 50 percent higher than during previous launches.

The Starlink team commanded the satellites into a safe-mode where they would fly edge-on (like a sheet of paper) to minimize drag—to effectively “take cover from the storm” — and continued to work closely with the Space Force’s 18th Space Control Squadron and LeoLabs to provide updates on the satellites based on ground radars.

Preliminary analysis show the increased drag at the low altitudes prevented the satellites from leaving safe-mode to begin orbit raising maneuvers, and up to 40 of the satellites will re-enter or already have re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere.

The deorbiting satellites pose zero collision risk with other satellites and by design demise upon atmospheric reentry—meaning no orbital debris is created and no satellite parts hit the ground. This unique situation demonstrates the great lengths the Starlink team has gone to ensure the system is on the leading edge of on-orbit debris mitigation.

SpaceX clearly attempts to put a positive spin on all this at the end, but there’s no escaping that it will be quite a costly failure to lose that many LEOs in one go. In the grander scheme of things, this won’t impact Starlink’s future launch schedule, but it’s definitely not what they would have wanted. Nobody ever said space was easy.