Starlink said it will reduce the altitude of thousands of its internet-beaming satellites following a mishap with one and a near collision with others, a vivid reminder of how crowded — and dangerous — Earth’s orbit has become.
In a New Year’s Day post on X, Michael Nicholls, Starlink engineering vice president, said the company would begin “a significant reconfiguration of its satellite constellation” and lower the orbit of approximately 4,400 satellites, or nearly half its total of more than 9,000, from their current altitude of about 342 miles to about 298 miles.
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“Lowering the satellites results in condensing Starlink orbits, and will increase space safety in several ways,” Nicholls said, including by “reducing the aggregate likelihood of collision.”
A representative for Starlink did not immediately respond to CNET’s request for comment.
Satellite internet has become an increasingly attractive alternative to terrestrial options for broadband access such as cable, fiber and DSL, especially in rural areas. It is most closely identified with Starlink, a subsidiary of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, but other providers include Hughesnet and Viasat. Those satellites are typically in low Earth orbit, in contrast with those like GPS satellites that are thousands of miles from the ground.
In early December, a Starlink satellite came within roughly 200 meters (656 feet) of a Chinese satellite, Nicholls posted on X on Dec. 12. He said the Chinese satellite was one of nine deployed days earlier and blamed “lack of coordination between satellite operators,” citing negligence by the operators at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in Northwestern China prior to the deployment of those nine satellites. “This needs to change,” he said in the post.
There are nearly 12,000 active satellites in orbit and thousands more that have stopped working. That number is expected to rise rapidly as SpaceX continues sending up Starlink satellites and as rival internet constellations get built out by projects, such as Amazon Leo (formerly Project Kuiper) and China’s “Thousand Sails.”
Starlink’s announcement this week comes two weeks after one of its satellites “experienced an anomaly” and began “tumbling” toward Earth from its height of 260 miles. The company said the object will disintegrate when it hits the Earth’s atmosphere and also does not pose a danger to the International Space Station, which also flies in low Earth orbit.
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In his X post this week, Nicholls also pointed to “solar minimum” as another reason to reduce the orbital altitude of its satellites. Solar minimum is the period of time when there is the least amount of solar activity — such as sunspots and solar flares — during the sun’s 11-year solar cycle. During this phase, satellites can last longer in space because there is less atmospheric density and thus less drag on the vehicle. But that also means more congestion for a longer span of time.
Nicholls said that the satellites’ “ballistic decay time” — that is, the time it takes a projectile to lose energy in its descent toward Earth — will decrease from 4-plus years to just a few months.
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