Today's top story

Super El Niño cometh

A "super El Niño" is on the cards this summer, and it could supercharge temperatures to make 2027 a contender for the hottest year on record.

That's according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Climate Prediction Center, which declared there is a 62% chance the natural climate pattern will emerge between June and August, and a 1-in-3 likelihood it will be especially strong.

That's big news for our increasingly disrupted climate, with El Niño tending to strengthen hurricane activity over the central and eastern Pacific while suppressing hurricanes in the Atlantic, and triggering extreme weather such as floods, droughts and heatwaves across the globe.

The trend

Crowded skies

There are now 10,000 Starlink satellites above our heads. The news comes as a Falcon 9 rocket, which launched from California last night, added 25 new satellites to the growing low Earth orbit constellation. [Spaceflight Now]

It's a remarkable technical achievement, especially considering the tens of thousands of avoidance maneuvers satellites in the array need to complete to avoid crashing into each other. But it also comes at a great cost to radio astronomy and potentially to nearby spacecraft, while also raising the odds of an uncontrolled orbital chain reaction.

Three to read

1. U.K. officials race to contain the spread of a bacterial strain of meningitis behind a fatal outbreak in Kent, England. [The Guardian]
2. Federal court blocks Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s vaccine changes, alongside his remaking of a key vaccine advisory panel. [The Hill]
3. A single injection of mRNA-like treatment could help heart muscle heal after a heart attack in mice and pigs. Could it work in humans too? [Live Science]

Say it, said it

Word of the day: Etosha — An Oshindonga (dialect of Namibian) word that translates roughly to "Great White Place." The Etosha Pan is an approximately 1,800-square-mile (4,700 square kilometers) salt flat north of Namibia's capital, Windhoek. And it looks absolutely stunning from space.

Quote of the day: "Think of your brain like a city: while the whole city is awake and active, a few specific 'neighborhoods' (brain regions) decide to turn off their lights for a second. If those neighborhoods are responsible for attention, you experience a lapse."

Elaine Pinggal, a neuroscientist at Monash University, Melbourne, on how sleep-like brain activity can make our attentions lapse, and how adults with ADHD experience them much more often.

Fun and games

This crossword by Senior Staff Writer Harry Baker took our Editor-in-Chief Alexander McNamara one minute and 55 seconds to complete. Think you can beat him?

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Earth-orbiting satellites could begin colliding with one another in less than three days in a worst-case-scenario scenario — potentially triggering a runaway cascade that may render low Earth orbit (LEO) unusable, a new preprint study warns. This is 125 days quicker than if an emergency had happened just seven years ago, according to the researchers' newly devised "CRASH Clock."

The number of spacecraft orbiting our planet is rising fast, thanks largely to the rise of satellite "megaconsetllations," such as SpaceX's Starlink network. As of May 2025, there were at least 11,700 active satellites around Earth, most of which are located in LEO — the region of the atmosphere up to 1,200 miles (2,000 km) above Earth. For context, that is a 485% increase on the roughly 2,000 satellites in LEO at the end of 2018, before the first Starlink launch in 2019. And all signs suggest that this is only the beginning.

One of the big problems with having so many satellites circling us is an increased chance they may collide with each another, creating clouds of fast-moving debris that could impact other spacecraft, including human-occupied space stations. Satellite operators are largely able to avoid these collisions. However, if they were to lose control of their respective spacecraft — either via a technical glitch, a cyber attack or a massive solar storm — they would be powerless to prevent a potential catastrophe.

In a new study, uploaded to the preprint server arXiv on Dec. 10, researchers proposed a new way of measuring the risk of a collision occurring if every spacecraft was rendered inoperable by one of these worst-case scenarios. The team dubbed this metric the Collision Realization And Significant Harm (CRASH) Clock. By modelling the distribution of spacecraft in LEO, the CRASH Clock shows how long it would take for the first collision to occur. (This is similar to how the infamous "Doomsday Clock" shows us how far we are away from a hypothetical global armageddon.)

"The CRASH Clock is a statistical measure of the timescale expected for a close approach that could give rise to a collision," study co-author Aaron Boley, an astronomer at The University of British Columbia, told Live Science in an email. "The idea is that it can be used as an environmental indicator that helps to evaluate the overall health of the orbital region while enabling people to conceptualize just how much or how little room there is for error."

In the new paper, the team calculated that the value of the CRASH Clock by the end of 2025 was around 2.8 days, with a 30% chance that a collision could occur within 24 hours of an emergency that renders satellites inoperable. This is much less than the clock's predicted value for 2018, estimated to be 128 days, which would have given operators much more time to recover their assets.

These findings have not yet been peer-reviewed, and the study team now thinks that they slightly overestimated how short the CRASH Clock really is, Boley told Live Science. However, the rate at which these timeframes have changed, regardless of their exact values, is what is most concerning. (A new, more reliable value for the CRASH Clock is likely to be published later this year.)

"Seeing that difference [in values] is one factor that motivated us to develop the CRASH Clock further," Boley said. The fact that the value has decreased so significantly already is just as good an "indicator of the stress on orbit" as the CRASH Clock itself, he added.

The value of the CRASH Clock will likely continue to decrease further in the coming years as more satellites are deployed. In 2025, for example, there were 324 orbital launches, which is a new record and represents a 25% increase compared to 2024, SpaceNews recently reported.

The researchers have not predicted exactly how much the CRASH Clock will change in the coming years. However, they suspect that the current trend will continue: "Whether the CRASH Clock decreases will depend on the continued approach to industrializing Earth orbits," Boley said. "It could continue to get shorter if densification of orbital shells continues."

The most likely way that a CRASH Clock scenario would play out is via a sizable solar storm, which can temporarily scramble satellite systems with large doses of radiation, study lead author Sarah Thiele, an astrophysics researcher at Princeton University, recently told Live Science's sister site Space.com. During such an event, "it becomes impossible to estimate where objects are going to be in the future," she added.

If satellites remained offline for longer than the CRASH Clock value then multiple collisions could occur, which could push us dangerously close to the threshold of the Kessler Syndrome — a theoretical scenario where cascading collisions in LEO triggers causes space junk to exponentially increase to the point where nothing could safely operate there.

The researchers are reluctant to predict a timeframe for this scenario because there are too many variables surrounding subsequent satellite collisions, and nobody really knows at what point the Kessler syndrome will be triggered, Boley said. However, if we are not careful, we may soon "be in the early stages" of an irreversible cascade of collisions, he warned.

SpaceX's secretive "Starshield" government-operated intelligence satellites are deliberately emitting radio signals the "wrong way around," and outside of the frequency ranges designated by international authorities, a new paper has revealed.

The signals, which were accidentally discovered by an amateur astronomer, may have the potential to negatively impact other spacecraft around them, NPR recently reported.

Starshield satellites are an offshoot of SpaceX's ever-expanding Starlink constellation that have been specially built for and operated by branches of the U.S. government. Very little is known about the Starshield program, which was first announced in 2023, including where the satellites are positioned around Earth, what their mission parameters are, or how they differ from standard Starlink satellites, according to Live Science's sister site Space.com.

SpaceX has launched dozens of Starshield batches into space so far. They likely total more than 200 individual satellites, although the exact number is unclear. The majority of the satellites are operated by the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), while a small number are controlled by the U.S. Space Force. In total, the U.S. government has paid an estimated $1.8 billion for the Starshield network, according to The Wall Street Journal.

On Oct. 17, Scott Tilley, an amateur astronomer and citizen scientist who has previously tracked China's mysterious space plane and rediscovered a lost NASA satellite, released a new paper describing a series of anomalous satellite signals. Tilley initially came across these signals by mistake, after switching his equipment to a frequency range that is almost never used by satellites, and he was initially unsure what was causing them.

"It was just a clumsy move at the keyboard," Tilley told NPR. "I was resetting some stuff and then all of a sudden I'm looking at the wrong antenna, the wrong band." After comparing the signals to data collected from other amateur astronomers, he realized that they were likely coming from Starshield satellites, which he "wasn't expecting at all." (Tilley's findings have not yet been peer-reviewed.)

The new signals have frequencies between 2,025 and 2,110 megahertz, which are normally used for "uplink" signals, sent from Earth-based operators up into space. But in this case, these frequencies are being used to send "downlinks," or messages from satellites back to the planet's surface. As a result, the signals do not fall within the downlink frequencies approved by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) — a United Nations agency that coordinates the use of the radio spectrum across the globe and in space.

"These signals seem to be intentionally emitted by Starshield satellites, but outside of permitted frequency ranges," Benjamin Winkel, a radio astronomer at the Max Planck Institute of Radio Astronomy in Germany, told Live Science. But it is unclear why they are using uplink signals instead of standard downlink frequencies, he added.

In addition to potentially revealing the satellites' classified locations, Tilley warned that the Starshield signals could disrupt other spacecraft: "Nearby satellites could receive radio-frequency interference and could perhaps not respond properly to commands — or ignore commands — from Earth," he told NPR.

But not everyone is convinced. "I think it [the signals] is definitely happening," Kevin Gifford, a computer science professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, who specializes in radio interference from spacecraft, told NPR. However, it is too soon to tell if these signals interfere with other spacecraft, and no such incidents have been reported so far, he added.

Tilley detected signals coming from 170 different Starshield satellites, hinting that the downlinks are probably being used by the entire constellation. This further suggests that the signals are being emitted on purpose, which some experts find unsurprising.

"SpaceX is smart and savvy," Gifford said. It's possible they decided to just "do it and ask forgiveness later," he added.

Neither SpaceX nor the NRO has commented on the newly discovered signals so far.

Disruptive SpaceX signals

This is not the first time SpaceX has run into issues regarding radio signals.

In 2023, a group of astronomers revealed that Generation 1 Starlink satellites are accidentally leaking a large amount of radio pollution, known as unintended electromagnetic radiation (UEMR), into space — and that the frequencies of these signals overlap with those used by radio astronomers. A follow-up study, in 2024, also revealed that Generation 2 Starlinks are leaking even more UEMR than their Generation 1 counterparts.

This problem is likely to get much worse as the number of private satellites increases. For example, SpaceX recently launched its 10,000th Starlink satellite into orbit. And while not all of those satellites remain operational, those that do represent around 60% of the roughly 12,000 active satellites currently orbiting our planet. Some experts also predict that we could end up with around 100,000 satellites by 2050.

Earlier this year, Live Science revealed that, if left unchecked, the UEMR from these future satellites could eventually disrupt all forms of ground-based radio astronomy, significantly handicapping our ability to study the cosmos.

Initial observations suggest that the new Starshield signals will not have a major impact on radio astronomy, Winkel said. However, like every other private satellite, they will likely be emitting some form of UEMR, he added.

There's no doubt that SpaceX's Starlink internet service has connected the world like never before — but at what cost? Astronomers have long voiced concerns about Starlink's satellite constellation interfering with observations of the universe, and a new survey by Curtin University confirms those fears.

An analysis of 76 million images from a prototype station for the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) radio telescope found Starlink satellite emissions affected up to 30% of images in some datasets; such interference could affect research outcomes that depend on that data.The survey identified more than 112,000 radio emissions from 1,806 Starlink satellites, and found that uch of the observed interference is not intentional.

"Some satellites were detected emitting in bands where no signals are supposed to be present at all, such as the 703 satellites we identified at 150.8 MHz, which is meant to be protected for radio astronomy," study lead Dylan Grigg, a Ph.D. candidate at Curtin University, said in a statement.

Grigg noted these unintended emissions might come from onboard electronics. "Because … they're not part of an intentional signal, astronomers can't easily predict them or filter them out," he said.

While the International Telecommunication Union does regulate satellite emissions to protect astronomical observations, current rules "focus on intentional transmissions and do not cover this type of unintended emission," said Steven Tingay, a Curtin professor and executive director of the Curtin Institute of Radio Astronomy.

Related: 'No radio astronomy from the ground would be possible anymore': Satellite mega-swarms are blinding us to the cosmos — and a critical 'inflection point' is approaching

However, it's not only Starlink satellites that are the problem. The study team's survey focused on Starlink because it currently has the most extensive constellation, with more than 7,000 satellites deployed at the time of the survey, but other satellite networks can "leak" unintended transmissions, too.

"It is important to note that Starlink is not violating current regulations, so is doing nothing wrong. Discussions we have had with SpaceX on the topic have been constructive," said Tingay. "We hope this study adds support for international efforts to update policies that regulate the impact of this technology on radio astronomy research that are currently underway."

The team's research was published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

In 2024, several farmers across Saskatchewan, Canada, had to deal with a bizarre situation: chunks of SpaceX space junk had crashed onto their land. As I helped a couple of these farmers negotiate the wild world of international space law, not significantly updated since the Apollo era, I knew this situation would become increasingly common.

The first generation of megaconstellation satellites, led by the SpaceX Starlink initial launch of 60 satellites in 2019, have now reached the end of their incredibly short operating lifetimes.

The end-of-life plan for virtually every satellite in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) is to burn them up in Earth's atmosphere. Economically, this makes sense: it takes a lot less propellant to bring a satellite down into a lower orbit than up into a higher orbit, sometimes called a "graveyard" orbit.

But the economic argument for bringing these satellites back down to Earth ignores the very real environmental consequences of atmospheric disposal. The chassis, leftover propellant, electronics, antennas, and solar panels don't disappear when a satellite "burns up" — the mass of the metals and plastics that comprise the satellite is deposited in the atmosphere as metal vapor.

When just a few satellites are burned every year, it's not a significant change to atmospheric chemistry. But Starlink alone plans to have 42,000 satellites with 5-year operating lifetimes, so the mass of metal vapor entering the atmosphere (particularly highly reactive aluminum and lithium) will exceed natural infall rates by 25 times or more.

This much extra metal vapor in the stratosphere can change atmospheric chemistry and may cause ozone depletion. By 2023, 10% of stratospheric aerosols already included metals from rocket and satellite reentries.

LEO satellites burning up are a source of upper atmospheric pollution that's going to increase exponentially — and scientists are only just beginning to study what this massive increase in metal vapor could do in the stratosphere.

Whatever parts of the reentering satellites don’t burn up will hit the ground. Just in the past few months, spacecraft pieces have fallen on Poland, Kenya, North Carolina, and Algeria, while scientists carefully tracked a 1970s Soviet Venus probe's reentry and speculated about ground casualty risks. That spacecraft, Kosmos 482, crashed into the Indian Ocean earlier this month.

While identifiable debris from only one Starlink satellite has so far been recovered, there are likely many, many more pieces already on the ground in other places that are covered by woods or mountains.

Related: 'No radio astronomy from the ground would be possible anymore': Satellite mega-swarms are blinding us to the cosmos — and a critical 'inflection point' is approaching

At some point, a bit of falling space junk will kill someone. Scientists recently calculated the risk of a casualty from one of the over 2,000 rocket bodies in orbit is 10% in the next decade, but that doesn’t include the tens of thousands of satellites expected to reenter in that same time period.

So what's the solution?

Leaving unmaneuverable, dead satellites in orbit is not an option. They pose a safety risk to other satellites, potentially orbiting for decades at 16,000 mph (25,000 km/h).

Collisions at these speeds are catastrophic, producing debris bullets that can crash into other satellites, producing more debris. The worst-case scenario is called Kessler Syndrome, where these collisions become self-propagating, and the debris field makes LEO unusable for decades to centuries.

Starlink has the highest density of operational satellites that has ever existed in orbit. It has reported an average of one collision avoidance maneuver within their megaconstellation every two minutes in the second half of 2024, and they have already launched hundreds more satellites into that orbital shell since then.

So far, Starlink has been impressively successful at avoiding collisions. But the frequency of collision avoidance maneuvers means that if there is a large solar flare, or their systems get hacked, or there's a simple human error, no maneuvers can be executed for any significant window of time — raising the risk of a collision.

Having fewer satellites in orbit naturally reduces the danger of collisions and the worst-case scenario of Kessler Syndrome. It also reduces light pollution from satellites, which is the reason I originally started worrying about megaconstellations. Satellites are already degrading astronomy research, including the discovery of potentially hazardous asteroids. Fewer satellites will allow astronomers to continue exploring space with telescopes, and stargazers to continue exploring space with their eyes.

LEO is a valuable resource that must be protected and shared in a way that benefits the most people while simultaneously protecting LEO for use by future generations. We cannot have tens of thousands of satellites in LEO without severe consequences for the atmosphere and an increasingly high likelihood of Kessler Syndrome, which will limit our use of satellites for decades to centuries.

This is the urgent challenge that satellite engineers and operators must now meet: if they need to provide services from orbit with fewer, longer-lived satellites, how will they do that? Without far-reaching, international regulation, or self-imposed limits from satellite companies, current practices in LEO threaten the planet, and our ability to explore beyond it.

Opinion on Live Science gives you insight on the most important issues in science that affect you and the world around you today, written by experts and leading scientists in their field.

If you look up at the sky on a clear night, shortly after one of SpaceX's many Falcon 9 rocket launches, you might see a bright string of lights zooming across the heavens.

This phenomenon, known as a Starlink train, occurs when light reflects off a newly deployed batch of SpaceX satellites before they eventually fan out and become part of the wider Starlink network. It is also a common reminder that giant groups of private satellites, known as "megaconstellations," are quickly becoming a reality.

But behind these lights lurks an invisible — and much more problematic — form of radiation: radio waves.

If our eyes could also detect this hidden radiation, the sky would be full of bright spots and nonstop flashing that would obscure the distant signals from objects beyond low Earth orbit (LEO). And unlike the light pollution we see from satellites, these intrusive signals don't just happen at night or in the hours after new satellites are released — they happen all the time.

Some researchers are so worried about this invisible pollution that they think we could eventually reach an "inflection point," beyond which ground-based astronomy instruments could become radio-blind to the cosmos.

"It would basically mean that no radio astronomy from the ground would be possible anymore," Benjamin Winkel, a radio astronomer at the Max Planck Institute of Radio Astronomy in Germany, told Live Science. "It will eventually reach a point where it is not worthwhile to operate a [radio] telescope anymore."

At the rate that megaconstellations are growing, this could happen within the next 30 years, some experts predict.

Unique view of the cosmos

Radio astronomy allows us to see a host of hidden cosmic structures and phenomena that we can’t detect through visual light alone.

Scientists use radio frequencies to study a range of phenomena, from the jets of energy shooting from supermassive black holes to the subtle changes in the trajectories of near-Earth asteroids.

Radio telescopes are also constantly finding phenomena, such as fast radio bursts — millisecond pulses of ultra-energetic radiation, some of which repeat at regular intervals — that come from super-dense, highly magnetic objects such as neutron stars. Their observations also provide some of the best insights into the "Age of Reionization," as far back as 400 million years after the Big Bang, when the first stars and galaxies were emerging from clouds of primordial hydrogen.

Scientists scouring the skies for signs of alien life, such as those at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute, also favor hunting in radio waves because any advanced civilizations will likely use these wavelengths for communication, just as humans do.

We also rely on radio telescopes to pin down our precise location compared to other cosmic objects, which is constantly shifting.

The radio portion of the electromagnetic spectrum ranges from roughly 3 kilohertz to over 300 gigahertz — equal to wavelengths from more than 60 miles (100 kilometers) long down to 0.04 inches (1 millimeter). However, not all of these wavelengths are visible from Earth, and most astronomers hunt for signals somewhere between 1 megahertz and 100 GHz, according to the British Astronomical Association.

Many of the world's biggest radio telescope arrays focus on even narrower ranges. For instance, the world's largest single telescope, China's Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope, searches between 70 MHz to 3 GHz; while the Square Kilometre Array Observatory (SKAO), the world's largest array of radio telescopes scattered across Australia and South Africa, scans between 50 MHz to 14 GHz.

But increasingly, many of these frequencies are being bombarded by noise from Starlink and other satellites.

Leaking radio waves

While satellite messages deliberately beamed down to operators on Earth, known as intended downlinks, are problematic, the biggest risk to these projects is what's known as unintended electromagnetic radiation (UEMR), or the radio waves that inadvertently leak out of the spacecraft at all times.

"This was not a problem before, when the number of satellites was low," Federico Di Vruno, a radio astronomer at SKAO and co-director of the International Astronomical Union's recently created Centre for the Protection of the Dark and Quiet Sky from Satellite Constellation Interference (CPS), told Live Science. "But now the situation has changed."

And UEMR is particularly prevalent among private satellite constellations, such as Starlink.

When Di Vruno and colleagues used Europe's Low-Frequency Array (LOFAR) to observe a group of Generation 1 Starlink satellites, they found that the satellites were leaking UEMR at a much higher rate than other orbiting spacecraft. In their results, published in 2023, they reported that this radiation had frequencies between 110 and 188 megahertz, representing a large portion of the operating range of LOFAR (10 to 240 MHz), which scans for signals from pulsars, solar wind, cosmic rays and galaxies from the Age of Reionization.

"We were not surprised that we detected something," Winkel, who was a co-author of the study, told Live Science. "But we didn't anticipate that the level would be so high." However, what came next was even more shocking.

In September 2024, Di Vruno and Winkel were co-authors of a follow-up LOFAR study that showed that the newer Generation 2 Starlink satellites were leaking over 30 times more UEMR than their predecessors, even though the researchers had previously warned SpaceX about the findings of the initial study. This radiation was emitted in roughly the same frequency bandwidth as the Gen 1 satellites.

And SpaceX will not be the only source of UEMR. Other companies, agencies and countries are also launching competing satellite constellations. These include Amazon's Project Kuiper, Eutelsat's OneWeb network (which is being launched by SpaceX), the European Union's IRIS² network, AST SpaceMobile's giant communication satellites, and China's Qianfan, or "Thousand Sails," constellation, Di Vruno noted.

"We don't know [how much UEMR these spacecraft will emit] yet," Winkel said. "Every satellite will have UEMR, but it remains to be seen, at what level." As a result, many other frequencies could be affected, he added.

Closing cosmic "windows"

In addition to overlapping with the frequencies of distant signals, UEMR is also much more intense, or brighter, than naturally occurring radio-emitting objects.

For example, the UEMR emitted by the Gen 2 Starlink satellites is up to 10 million times brighter than the faintest radio-visible objects in the night sky, which include ancient galaxies located billions of light-years from Earth.

"This difference is similar to the faintest stars visible to the naked eye and the brightness of the full moon," Cees Bassa, an astronomer at the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (ASTRON) and lead author of the 2024 study, previously stated.

Trying to detect signals from beyond one of these satellites is "like taking a photograph while someone points a flashlight in your direction," Winkel said.

Some radio telescopes, such as LOFAR, will be hit harder than others, due to the frequencies they specialize in, but all radio telescopes will be affected "in different ways," Di Vruno said.

Studies that require long-term datasets will be particularly susceptible to interference because there is a greater chance that leaky satellites will pass over them during the data collection period.

"As some projects need to continuously record data over hours, days, months or years, even tiny interference signals can have a statistical impact on the results," Winkel said. "And perhaps the astronomer analyzing the data is not even aware of it."

Intended downlinks, which are sent in multiple frequencies over 1 GHz, are also extremely bright and often appear in tandem with UEMR, exaggerating these effects.

As the problem gets worse, certain frequencies will become increasingly hard to study.

"Some radio bands could be completely wiped out," Di Vruno said. "And if [these] science cases are just not possible anymore, it would mean that we are effectively closing 'windows' to observe our universe."

Approaching the inflection point

As of May, there are 11,700 active satellites orbiting Earth. More than 7,300 of those (over 60%) are Starlink satellites, which have all been launched since 2019, according to Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who has been tracking satellite launches and reentries since 1986.

But this is just the beginning. Well over 1 million satellites have been proposed by various organizations across the globe. And, while most of these may never be launched, many experts agree that we could eventually have up to 100,000 private satellites in LEO, potentially by as early as 2050. (This will likely be the maximum number that can be sustained at once without satellites crashing into one another.)

Related: What goes up must come down: How megaconstellations like SpaceX's Starlink network pose a grave safety threat to us on Earth

If that maximum number is reached, there is "real possibility" that we could reach an inflection point, beyond which ground-based radio astronomy would become effectively impossible, Di Vruno said.

Not all radio frequencies will be impacted. However, the obscured wavelengths will likely be lost for good, and the unaffected frequencies are unlikely to yield as many meaningful discoveries, he added.

At this point, we would no longer be able to "observe faint signals far out into the universe," which would be "a serious problem," Fionagh Thomson, a research fellow at Durham University in England who specializes in space ethics and was not involved in the LOFAR research, told Live Science.

Some radio astronomy could also still be achievable from space on a smaller scale. For example, there are plans to build a radio telescope on the moon. However, this would be very expensive and would capture limited data compared with the current suite of radio telescopes on Earth.

But even if we avoid the "worst-case scenario," we risk severely limiting our astronomical capabilities unless satellite operators and researchers can find viable solutions to the problem, Thomson said.

Plugging leaks and cleaning data

Satellite operators can limit the impacts of their spacecraft on radio astronomy in a few ways.

For example, most intended downlink frequencies are kept separate from those used by radio astronomers. Some companies, including SpaceX, are also investigating the implementation of "boresight avoidance," in which the satellites temporarily halt signal sending as they pass over radio "quiet zones," or areas where radio telescopes are actively collecting data.

However, for astronomers, it is also imperative that these companies minimize UEMR. We know that this is possible because spacecraft from NASA and other space agencies produce much less accidental radiation than private satellites do.

But companies can only mitigate a satellite's UEMR before it is launched into space. Once in LEO, "they are hard to fix," Winkel said, so it is vital that they are tested for leaks before launch.

"If satellite operators care about the UEMR, we will be OK," Di Vruno said. "It will be more difficult to conduct radio astronomy than it is now, but we understand technology evolves and we will evolve with it."

Astronomers can also limit the impacts of radio pollution by removing the interfering signals from their datasets. However, this "cleaning" may cause astronomers to miss crucial data that is masked by the interference.

"The amount of data you have to discard or the effort that you need to put in to somehow clean the data also increases the more interference there is," Winkel said. One way around this is to collect more data so that there is more left once you've cleaned it, but this also makes it much more expensive to do research, he added.

By working together, satellite operators and radio astronomers can solve the radio pollution issue without any external help, Thomson said. "But inevitably, satellite operators and the radio astronomy community have different goals, priorities and budgets, and finding workable solutions is no easy feat."

Laying down the law

Because private companies and scientists have different priorities, the most effective solution to the problem is to impose strict limits on the amount of UEMR that private spacecraft can give off, experts told Live Science.

"We would, of course, be more relaxed if proper regulation was in place," Winkel said.

At present, specific radio frequencies, like those used by LOFAR, are protected on behalf of astronomers by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) — a United Nations agency responsible for regulating global communications technologies. However, these regulations apply only to Earth-based sources of radio pollution, not to private spacecraft.

Most satellite operators do try to respect the ITU's guidelines when using intended downlinks — with limited degrees of success. But UEMR frequently overlaps with the protected wavelengths and remains perfectly legal.

Some experts also argue that the ITU's radio-quiet frequency bands are no longer wide enough to protect radio astronomy: "They were set in a different era and are arguably too narrow for modern radio astronomy," Thomson said.

The IAU's CPU is hoping to have strict new regulations in place by the end of the decade and hopes that a breakthrough can be achieved at the next World Radiocommunication Conference, in 2027, Di Vruno said. Therefore, it is important for researchers to closely monitor the radiation leaking from private satellite constellations over the next few years, so that any new rules can have an effective and long-standing impact, he added.

However, even stricter guidelines might not be enough if organizations don't respect them.

"There is an assumption that imposing laws will fix complex problems," Thomson said. "But not all viable solutions involve implementing binding legislation," she warned.

In the last five years, the number of satellites orbiting Earth has more than doubled and will likely double again within a similar timespan, thanks to the efforts of private companies such as SpaceX. But while these spacecraft can provide important benefits, they are also causing multiple issues that are only just being realized by scientists.

So, how many satellites can we expect to see in our skies in the coming decades? And — more importantly — how many is too many?

As of May 2025, there are around 11,700 active satellites in orbit around Earth, ranging from military spy satellites and scientific probes to rapidly growing private satellite networks. But the rate at which spacecraft are being launched into space is increasing year-on-year.

The biggest contributor to this trend is SpaceX's Starlink constellation, which currently has around 7,500 active satellites in orbit — more than 60% of the total number of operational orbiting spacecraft, Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who has been tracking satellites since 1989, told Live Science. All of these have been launched since May 2019.

However, other organizations are also beginning to develop their own "megaconstellations," such as Amazon's Project Kuiper and China's "Thousand Sails" constellation. It is also getting easier to put new satellites into space thanks to the reusability of rockets, such as SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket, which is being used to launch multiple competing satellite networks. Other companies are also exploring new ways of launching larger payloads, including shooting hundreds of satellites into space at once using a giant spinning cannon.

Related: There was nearly 1 rocket launch attempt every 34 hours in 2024 — this year will be even busier

All of this activity has left researchers wondering how many satellites could eventually end up orbiting our planet and what problems they might cause along the way.

"Megaconstellations are planning to cover most of the Earth's surface," Fionagh Thomson, a senior research fellow at the University of Durham in the U.K. who specializes in space ethics, told Live Science. But there is still "a large amount of uncertainty" over how large they might get and how damaging they could become, she added.

Best guess

It is difficult to estimate how many satellites will be launched in the future because satellite companies often change their plans, Aaron Boley, an astronomer at The University of British Columbia in Canada who has extensively studied the potential effects of megaconstellations, told Live Science.

"Companies update their plans as they develop their systems, and many proposed systems will never be launched. But many will," Boley said.

Proposals for more than 1 million private satellites belonging to around 300 different megaconstellations have been submitted to the International Telecommunications Union, which regulates communications satellites, according to a 2023 study co-authored by Boley. However, some of these, including a proposed 337,000-satellite megaconstellation from Rwanda, are unlikely to come to fruition, the researchers noted.

The proposed number seems massive, but most private satellites have short lifespans. For example, the average Starlink satellite spends around five years operational, after which it falls back to Earth and burns up upon reentry. So even if all 1 million proposed satellites are launched, they will not all be orbiting Earth at once.

While it is tricky to predict how many satellites will be launched and when, researchers have estimated a maximum number of spacecraft that can coexist within low-Earth orbit (LEO) — the region of space up to 1,200 miles (2,000 kilometers) above Earth's surface, where a vast majority of private satellites operate. Above this upper limit, or carrying capacity, satellites would likely start constantly crashing into one another.

McDowell and Boley, as well as other astronomers — including Federico Di Vruno at the transnational Square Kilometer Array (SKA) Observatory and Benjamin Winkel at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Germany — all believe that the carrying capacity for LEO is around 100,000 active satellites. Above this number, new satellites will likely only be launched to replace those that come to the end of their operational lives.

It is unclear exactly when this carrying capacity will be reached. However, based on the current rate of increasing launches, several experts told Live Science that it could happen before 2050.

Mega-problems

Given the impending rise in satellite numbers, researchers are hard at work trying to figure out what problems they may cause.

A major issue associated with megaconstellations is space junk, including rocket boosters and defunct satellites, that will litter LEO before eventually falling back to Earth. If space junk collides , it could create thousands of smaller pieces of debris that increase the risk of further collisions. If left unchecked, this domino effect could render LEO effectively unusable. Researchers call this problem the "Kessler syndrome" and are already warning that it should be tackled now, before it is too late.

Megaconstellations also threaten to severely limit ground-based astronomy in two main ways: First, light reflecting off satellites can interfere with optical astronomy by photobombing telescopes as they pass overhead; Second, electromagnetic radiation that unintentionally leaks from communications satellites can interfere with radio astronomy by obscuring signals from distant objects, such as faraway galaxies.

If the carrying capacity is reached, some experts fear that the level of radio interference could render some types of radio astronomy completely impossible.

Related: Controversial paper claims satellite 'megaconstellations' like SpaceX's could weaken Earth's magnetic field and cause 'atmospheric stripping.' Should we be worried?

Satellites can also impact the environment via greenhouse gases that are emitted during rocket launches, as well as through metal pollution that is accumulating in the upper atmosphere as defunct satellites and other space junk burn up upon reentry.

Given all these potential impacts, most researchers are calling for companies to reduce the rate at which they launch satellites.

"I don't think a full stop on satellite launches would work," Boley said. "However, slowing things down and delaying the placement of 100,000 satellites until we have better international rules would be prudent."

Do we need 100,000 satellites?

While private satellites help monitor Earth and connect rural and disadvantaged communities to high-speed internet, many experts argue that these benefits do not outweigh the potential risks.

Others are more skeptical and question whether the payloads being put into orbit will really do any good or if they are just a way for companies to make more money. "Do we really need another CubeSat in space that allows us to take selfies?" Thomson asked. "And in reality, does connecting remote communities [to the internet] help solve systemic issues of inequality, poverty and injustice?"

Many benefits could also be achieved with fewer satellites. The proposed numbers are so high, mainly because there are so many different companies competing to provide the same services.

"It would be better to cooperate more, in order to need fewer satellites," Winkel told Live Science. "But I find that highly unlikely given the current situation in the world."

SpaceX's Starlink satellite constellation is facing threats from Russia and China because it was tapped for military use in Ukraine following Russia's invasion of the nation in 2022, according to a new report evaluating the counterspace capabilities of a dozen countries over the past year.

The report, published on April 3 by the nonpartisan policy think tank Secure World Foundation (SWF), highlights how humanity's growing reliance on space — especially for national security — has led an increasing number of countries to develop their own counterspace capabilities. The 316-page document assesses the counterspace capabilities of 12 countries including the U.S., Russia, China, India, Australia as well as North Korea and South Korea, based on publicly available information spanning February 2024 through February of this year.

"We feel strongly that a more open and public debate on these issues is urgently needed," the report's foreword states. "Our global society and economy are increasingly dependent on space capabilities, and a future conflict in space could have massive, long-term negative repercussions that are felt here on Earth, as everyone on this planet is a user of space data in some form."

SpaceX's Starlink uses a massive network of satellites in low Earth orbit to provide high-speed broadband internet. Ukrainian residents began using Starlink in 2022 to maintain internet connectivity after Ukraine's own internet services were disrupted following Russia's invasion. The service also enabled secure communications for the Ukrainian military and government. Starting in May 2024, however, the Ukrainian military began experiencing outages in Starlink connections, with military officials attributing the disruptions to Russia "testing different mechanisms" for its electronic warfare systems seemingly employing new and more advanced technology.

The SWF report cites leaked U.S. military documents that suggest a Russian system called Tobol — that was originally designed to protect Russian satellites from jamming — was used to disrupt Starlink commercial satellite signals over Ukrainian territory. Those leaked documents "suggest that Russia has used at least three Tobol installations to try and disrupt Starlink commercial satellite signals over Eastern Ukraine," the report notes.

Russia appears to also be developing a newer, more sophisticated system called Kalinka, which is intended to detect and disrupt signals to and from Starlink satellites in order to interfere with Ukrainian drones and military communications, according to the SWF report. Andrei Bezrukov, the director of the Russian Center for Unmanned Systems and Technologies, which is developing the Kalinka system, told state media that the so-called "Starlink killer" could also detect communication terminals connected to Starshield, the military version of Starlink that's designed with enhanced security features.

Additional reports revealed that Russia had jammed GPS signals in four European countries: France, the Netherlands, Sweden and Luxembourg. There have also been reports that Russia interrupted children's TV channels in these countries to broadcast images of the war in Ukraine. The International Telecommunication Union's Radio Regulations Board has said the interference likely originated from stations in Moscow, Kaliningrad and Pavlovka.

"As of February 2025, the Starlink service appears to have been remarkably resistant to further cyber attacks," the report notes.

According to the SWF report, China is investing in similar capabilities for potential future armed conflicts with the U.S.

In July of last year, researchers from the People's Liberation Army Navy proposed laser-equipped submarines with retractable masts that could surface to target Starlink satellites or other space-based surveillance systems, although the researchers acknowledged that the submarines' limited detection capabilities would require external forces to provide satellite position guidance for accurate targeting.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Space Force is testing new satellite jammers called the Remote Modular Terminals, intended to operate remotely and provide counterspace electronic warfare capability, the report notes.

"Everyone is jamming," Victoria Samson, the director of Secure World's Washington office and one of the report's primary authors, told Breaking Defense earlier this week.

So far, only non-destructive counterspace capabilities are being actively used against satellites in current military operations, the report notes.

SpaceX's Starship has dramatically exploded mid-flight, leaving smears of confetti-like wreckage across the sky as its remains tumbled back to Earth. The fireball triggered diversions and delays to air traffic in Florida and the Caribbean amid warnings of falling debris.

The uncrewed rocket, the largest ever built, blasted off from SpaceX's Starbase at Boca Chica, Texas at 6:30 p.m. EST on March 6.

But the vessel spun out of control about nine minutes after launch, resulting in "a rapid unscheduled disassembly", SpaceX representatives said in a post on the social platform X.

Starship struggles

This is the eighth Starship launch since April 2023 and the second consecutive failure this year for SpaceX's rocket. Less than two months ago, the seventh Starship flight ended in an explosion that hurled fiery debris across skies above the Turks and Caicos Islands.

Just like after the previous failed launch, the Federal Aviation Administration has grounded further flights of the rocket pending a mishap investigation, which will be conducted by SpaceX.

"We will review the data from today's flight test to better understand [the] root cause," company representatives wrote on X. "As always, success comes from what we learn, and today's flight will offer additional lessons to improve Starship's reliability."

Related: 'Catastrophic' SpaceX Starship explosion tore a hole in the atmosphere last year in 1st-of-its-kind event, Russian scientists reveal

Standing 403 feet (123 meters) tall and propelled by a record-breaking 16.5 million pounds (7.5 million kilograms) of thrust from its 33-engine Super Heavy booster rocket, Starship can carry 10 times the payload of SpaceX's current Falcon 9 rockets.

The gargantuan rocket is key to SpaceX majority shareholder Elon Musk's ambitions to transport crewmembers, spacecraft, satellites and cargo into orbit around Earth and to the moon and Mars.

Starship is designed primarily with cheap and efficient manufacturing in mind, using inexpensive stainless steel for its construction and methane — which SpaceX says can be collected on Mars — to power the rocket.

The mission was a test flight, with the aim of testing the rocket's capabilities by deploying four mock Starlink satellites and restarting its engines in space before plopping down in the Indian Ocean. The exact cause of the explosion is currently unclear, although SpaceX representatives attributed it to "an energetic event in the aft portion of Starship" that caused the loss of several Raptor engines.

The explosion caused delays at Fort Lauderdale, Miami International and Philadelphia International airports between an average of 30 to 45 minutes, while planes flying over the Caribbean altered their flight paths to avoid the wreckage, imagery from Flightradar24 shows.

Flying wreckage from the previous failed launch, which is still being recovered, reportedly caused minor damage to a car in the Turks and Caicos Islands.

SpaceX said at the time that there were no toxic materials among the debris, although anyone who finds a piece of debris is advised not to handle it directly and to instead contact local authorities or the SpaceX Debris Hotline.

Following the previous explosion, SpaceX announced it had made upgrades to the Starship spacecraft that flew yesterday, including the installation of additional vents and a purge system that used nitrogen to flush fuel leaks and make the aft less flammable. It's clear that these didn’t get rid of the problem, but company representatives are optimistic that they can find and fix the faults.

"Unfortunately this happened last time too, so we've got some practice now," Dan Huot, a communications manager at SpaceX, said on a live stream of the launch.

The latest generation of SpaceX's Starlink satellites are leaking even more potentially disruptive radiation into low-Earth orbit than their predecessors, a new study shows. Researchers warn that the continuing unchecked deployment of the spacecraft could lead to an irreversible "inflection point," beyond which we can no longer properly study the universe's most exciting objects.

In July 2023, researchers discovered that SpaceX's Generation 1 Starlink satellites, first launched in 2019, are leaking unintended electromagnetic radiation (UEMR) into space. This radiation, which mainly consists of radio waves, is inadvertently given off by the satellites in multiple directions as they transmit radio signals to Earth. Unfortunately, these radio wave frequencies are very similar to those emitted by distant objects from across the cosmos, such as stars, exoplanets, black holes and pulsars, meaning that leakage from the satellites can obscure radio astronomers' readings.

Over the last year and a half, SpaceX has been phasing out these satellites in favor of newer Generation 2 models , which were first launched in February 2023. These spacecraft are smaller,more powerful, maneuverable and robust than their predecessors, according to Live Science's sister site Space.com. However, until now, it was unclear if they also leaked UEMR.

In the new study, published Sept. 18 in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, researchers used the Low-Frequency Array (LOFAR) telescope — a giant network of radio dishes spread across eight European countries — to track Gen 2 satellites. The astronomers found that the new spacecraft are even leakier than their Gen1 counterparts. The worst offenders are the "V2 mini" satellites, the current most common type of Gen 2 satellite, which can emit up to 32 times more UEMR than Gen 1 predecessors.

Related: World's largest communication satellite is a photobombing menace, astronomers warn

The UEMR from these new satellites and all those that will follow them into orbit over the next few decades could end up "blinding radio telescopes and crippling vital research of the universe," researchers wrote in a statement.

The UEMR emitted by the Den 2 satellites is up to 10 million times brighter than the faintest radio-visible objects in the night sky. "This difference is similar to the faintest stars visible to the naked eye and the brightness of the Full Moon," study lead author Cees Bassa, an astronomer at the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (ASTRON), said in the statement.

The number of Starlink satellites being launched into space is also increasing year-on-year, which means the problem will likely get much worse. SpaceX has already launched more than 1,300 satellites into space in 2024 — all of which have been V2 minis.

Other satellite megaconstellations, such as China's Thousand Sails Constellation and Amazon's Project Kuiper, are also starting to take shape, which could worsen the issue if they also leak UEMR. The study researchers estimate there could be up to 100,000 satellites in orbit by the end of the decade.

Study co-author Federico Di Vruno, an astronomer at the SKA observatory in the UK, says that we will eventually reach an "inflection point" where the amount of UEMR leaking from satellites will completely obscure radio astronomers' view of the cosmos. "We need to take action to preserve our sky as a window to explore the universe from Earth," Di Vruno said.

Other issues

The leaking radiation is not the only issue caused by Starlink satellites. The swarming spacecraft are also causing problems for visual astronomers by photobombing time lapse images with streaks of light. They can also be knocked out of orbit by solar storms and are responsible for over half of the close encounters between orbiting spacecraft.

When the satellites reach the end of their lives and fall back to Earth, they also leave metal pollution in the atmosphere as they burn up. Some scientists even think that this metal pollution could get so bad that it could one day interfere with Earth's protective magnetic field.

The Falcon 9 rockets that launch the satellites have also come under scrutiny. The reusable rockets have already been grounded by federal authorities twice this year due to explosive failures and have been known to create "ionospheric holes" when they leave or reenter the upper atmosphere.

Starlink satellite launches can also create giant swirls of light in the night sky, known as "SpaceX spirals." However, these light shows pose no threat to our planet.

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) grounded SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket on Wednesday (Aug 28), following a failed landing attempt that left the spacecraft toppled over in flames.

The reusable rocket booster had just completed its record-breaking 23rd mission, successfully launching 21 Starlink satellites into low Earth orbit before touching down on a drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean roughly nine minutes later, according to Live Science's sister site Space.com. However, immediately upon landing, the rocket tipped over, bursting into flames.

No injuries or public property damage were reported in connection with the failed landing.

The FAA announced a pause on all Falcon 9 launches later that day, putting all planned missions on hold until the agency completes its investigation into the mishap. It's not clear how long the investigation will take, but it has already impacted the planned launch of SpaceX's Polaris Dawn mission, which was scheduled to take four private citizens into orbit for a five-day voyage, potentially as soon as Friday (Aug. 30). The mission was previously delayed twice, due to unfavorable weather conditions on Tuesday (Aug. 27) and Wednesday.

Related: Boeing Starliner astronauts will spend at least 240 days stuck in space — is that a new record?

The Aug. 28 mishap not only ended that particular Falcon 9 rocket's record-breaking recovery streak but also cut short an even longer chain of successful SpaceX landings; before Wednesday's incident, the company had aced 267 consecutive Falcon 9 or Falcon Heavy booster landings, according to Space.com.

This is the second time Falcon 9 was grounded this year. In July, the rocket's upper stage malfunctioned in the middle of a Starlink launch, leading to the loss of 23 satellites. Though the rocket's lower booster stage still managed to stick its landing, the FAA grounded Falcon 9 for 15 days following the incident.

The first launch for a coming Chinese internet megaconstellation turned out to be quite messy.

Last Tuesday (Aug. 6) a Chinese Long March 6A rocket launched the first 18 satellites for the Qianfan ("Thousand Sails") broadband network, which will eventually host up to 14,000 spacecraft.

The rocket successfully delivered the satellites to low Earth orbit (LEO), at an altitude of about 500 miles (800 kilometers). But its upper stage broke apart shortly thereafter, generating a cloud of debris that's now racing around our planet, according to United States Space Command (USSPACECOM).

"USSPACECOM can confirm the breakup of a Long March 6A rocket launched on Aug. 6, 2024, resulting in over 300 pieces of trackable debris in low Earth orbit," the organization said in a statement on Aug. 8. "USSPACECOM has observed no immediate threats and continues to conduct routine conjunction assessments to support the safety and sustainability of the space domain."

"Trackable debris" is generally any object that's at least 4 inches (10 centimeters) in diameter. The newly spawned debris cloud doubtless also contains many shards that are too small to monitor.

This was a worrisome start for the Thousand Sails constellation, according to Slingshot Aerospace, a California-based company dedicated to advancing space domain awareness and sustainability.

RELATED: Japan captures 1st image of space debris from orbit, and it's spookily stunning

"If even a fraction of the launches required to field this Chinese megaconstellation generate as much debris as this first launch, the result would be an untenable addition to the space debris population in LEO," Audrey Schaffer, vice president of strategy and policy at Slingshot, said in an emailed statement.

"Events like this highlight the importance of adherence to existing space debris mitigation guidelines to reduce the creation of new space debris and underscore the need for robust space domain awareness capabilities to rapidly detect, track and catalog newly launched space objects so they can be screened for potential conjunctions," she added.

This isn't the first time a Long March 6A upper stage — which weighs about 12,800 pounds (5,800 kilograms) without propellant — has spawned a debris cloud in orbit, as Slingshot noted. One of the rocket bodies broke apart on Nov. 12, 2022, shortly after deploying the Yunhai-3 weather satellite, according to NASA debris experts.

That event created 533 pieces of trackable debris by January 2023, according to the March 2023 issue of NASA's "Orbital Debris Quarterly News."

Earth orbit is getting more and more crowded, with both active satellites and pieces of debris. According to the European Space Agency, there are about 10,000 operational spacecraft zooming around our planet at the moment (most of them SpaceX Starlink internet satellites), roughly 40,500 pieces of debris at least 4 inches (10 cm) wide and 130 million shards at least 1 millimeter in diameter.

Originally published on Space.com.

Twenty Starlink satellites were prematurely released during a failed SpaceX rocket launch last week — and now, observations have confirmed they all burned up in the upper atmosphere after falling back to Earth. Experts are currently investigating what happened, and the rockets responsible will remain grounded until this investigation is concluded.

On July 11, SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 rocket from the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California at 10:35 p.m. ET, one day later than originally planned. The launch initially went as expected, and the rocket's first stage successfully detached from the satellite-laden second stage, before landing on a drone ship in the Pacific Ocean. However, the second stage then failed to complete its second burn due to a liquid oxygen leak, leaving it stranded in a low orbit around Earth. (It is currently unclear if the leak caused the delayed launch.)

The rocket's second stage was still able to release its payload. However, the satellites became stuck in an elliptical orbit around our planet, with a minimum altitude of 84 miles (135 kilometers) — around half the height at which they normally operate. At this elevation, atmospheric drag slowed the satellites down, and they began to fall back to Earth by around 3 miles (5 km) every completed orbit, SpaceX representatives wrote in a statement on July 11.

Related: Controversial paper claims satellite 'megaconstellations' like SpaceX's could weaken Earth's magnetic field and cause 'atmospheric stripping.' Should we be worried?

"At this level of drag, our maximum available thrust is unlikely to be enough to successfully raise the satellites," SpaceX representatives wrote. "As such, the satellites will re-enter Earth's atmosphere and fully demise."

The company gained control of most of the satellites and ordered them to perform burns at their maximum thrust, known as "warp 9," in a last-ditch attempt to regain altitude, Space News reported. But this was not enough to save the satellites.

Subsequent observations from Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at Harvard University, have since confirmed that all 20 satellites met a fiery death on July 12, Spaceweather.com reported.

The re-entering spacecraft did "not pose a threat to other satellites in orbit or to public safety," SpaceX representatives wrote. And so far, there have been no reports of the spacecraft reaching Earth's surface, according to Spaceweather.com.

This was the first Falcon 9 launch failure since 2016 and the biggest single loss of Starlink satellites since February 2022, when a geomagnetic storm knocked 40 satellites from the sky shortly after the satellites were put into Earth orbit.

SpaceX is now investigating what happened, under the supervision of the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), Live Science's sister site Space.com reported. The company will not be able to launch any more Falcon 9 rockets until this investigation is complete.

SpaceX's interplanetary Starship rocket was similarly grounded by the FAA in 2023 after it exploded minutes after take-off during its first test flight on April 20 last year.

It is currently unclear how long Falcon 9 rockets will be grounded for. But one unnamed industry expert told Space News that the spacecraft could be grounded for months, which — if correct — would force a major reshuffle of the company's launch schedule for the rest of the year.

Striking new photos show a perfect dashed line of light left behind by a dying SpaceX rocket in the night sky above Arizona. The luminous streak, which is the result of some clever photo trickery, is the latest reminder of the company's rapidly increasing launch schedule. 

On Saturday (March 30th), SpaceX launched two of their Falcon 9 rockets in less than four hours, Live Science's sister site Space.com reported. The first rocket, which was carrying the Eutelsat 36D telecommunications satellite, took off at 5:52 p.m. EDT from NASA's Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida. The second rocket, which was carrying 23 of the company's Starlink satellites, launched from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Center, located next door to KSC, at 9:30 p.m. EDT.

After deploying their payloads, the rockets' second stages — the main part of the rocket that separates from the rocket's reusable boosters — underwent controlled deorbit burns, which caused them to fall toward Earth and burn up in the planet's upper atmosphere.

Photographer Jeremy Perez had initially planned to capture the deorbit burn of the first rocket from near his home in Flagstaff, AZ but was left empty-handed due to thick cloud coverage. But by the time the second rocket began the same maneuver, the skies had cleared and Perez was able to catch some stunning images of the deorbiting debris, Spaceweather.com reported. 

In the new images, Perez combined multiple long-exposure shots of the ignited second stage as it passed overhead. The breaks in the luminous streak represent points where the camera's shutter was closed. 

Related: 10 bizarre phenomena that lit up the sky (and their scientific explanations)

In real-time the event appeared very differently: "It looked like a delicate, cometary dandelion poof drifting overhead," Perez told Spaceweather.com. The light also appeared white in real-time instead of the bright blues seen in the photos, he added.

In zoomed-in versions of the photos, you can also see a second dimmer line alongside the falling space junk. This streak is made up of light from the satellites deployed by the rocket, which were drifting alongside it before it started its final maneuver.

An increasingly common sight 

Saturday's twin launches were not the only SpaceX launches this week. 

On Monday (April 1), another Falcon 9 lifted off from the Vandenburg Space Force base in California and later deployed 22 more Starlink satellites into orbit, Space.com reported. The company also plans to launch two more Falcon 9 rockets on Friday (April 5) and Sunday (April 7), which will both deploy more satellites into orbit, according to SpaceFlightNow.com.  

The continued increase in SpaceX launches greatly enhances the chances of people seeing deorbiting material or other phenomena caused by the dying rockets, such as SpaceX spirals — swirls of light created by frozen rocket fuel ejected from deorbiting Falcon 9 boosters. For example, on March 4, one of these spirals briefly outshone the northern lights across large parts of the Arctic. 

Falcon 9 rockets can also be seen for miles as they rise into space and can occasionally punch holes in the upper atmosphere, triggering blood-red aurora-like light shows. 

But these light shows are not the only aspect of these ever-increasing launches that are catching people's eyes. Experts are also concerned with the number of Starlink satellites that are being deployed into low-Earth orbit, which are obscuring our ability to study the cosmos.

When these newly-launched satellites inevitably fail and are sent to burn up in the upper atmosphere, they will also release high levels of metal pollution in our skies, which could have potentially damaging impacts. 

"Spacecraft dust" from defunct satellites burning up in Earth's atmosphere could weaken our planet's magnetic field, a controversial new paper suggests. 

In the worst-case scenario, the unchecked expansion of commercial satellite "megaconstellations" orbiting Earth, such as SpaceX's Starlink network, may generate enough magnetic dust to cut our planet's protective shield in half, potentially leading to satellite disasters and "atmospheric stripping," the paper's author told Live Science. 

But is this outcome really likely? Other researchers are skeptical of the paper's claims, though they all agree on one thing: there's an urgent need to quantify the scale of the problem.

Private satellites currently in orbit are a rapidly growing headache for astronomers due to their tendency to photobomb cosmic images and interfere with radio telescopes, as well as the increased risk of collisions with other spacecraft. But the real threat they pose may be what happens to them when they die.

When spacecraft end their missions, most are deorbited and burned up in Earth's atmosphere to minimize the amount of space junk circling our planet. However, as they fall apart in flames, the dying spacecraft litter our upper atmosphere with vaporized metal pollution.

Related: Sci-fi inspired tractor beams are real, and could solve a major space junk problem

In the new theoretical paper, uploaded to the pre-print database arXiv in December 2023 but not yet peer-reviewed, Sierra Solter-Hunt, a doctoral candidate at the University of Iceland, proposed that this atmospheric spacecraft dust may compromise the magnetosphere — the part of Earth's magnetic field that extends into space and protects the atmosphere from solar radiation.

Solter-Hunt is concerned that if satellite megaconstellations evolve as planned, the amount of dust they release may create a magnetic shield that could limit the magnetosphere's reach.

"I was shocked at everything that I found and that nobody has been studying this," Solter-Hunt told Live Science. "I think it's really, really alarming."

Accumulating dust

We currently have no way of monitoring the amount of spacecraft dust in the atmosphere, but based on the amount of space junk that has already burned up on reentry, we could have increased the amount of metallic particulate in the skies by a million-fold since the start of the space age, Solter-Hunt said. 

And Solter-Hunt estimated between 500,000 and 1 million private satellites could orbit our planet in the coming decades. When all these satellites eventually fall to Earth it could dramatically increase the amount of spacecraft dust in the atmosphere to billions of times its current level, she said. 

Related: How many satellites orbit Earth?

It is currently unclear where all of this spacecraft dust will eventually end up but Solter-Hunt thinks that it will probably settle in the upper part of the ionosphere — a region of the atmosphere between 50 and 400 miles (80 and 644 kilometers) above the surface. "And it could just stay there forever," she added.

Magnetic shielding

If all these proposed satellites go up in flames, the resulting spacecraft dust could create a "perfect conductive net around our planet" that could be capable of carrying an electric charge, Solter-Hunt said. If this happened, the magnetosphere, which normally extends thousands of miles into space, would be "distorted to stay under the conducting material," essentially limiting its reach to the upper ionosphere, she added.

A reduced magnetic field could expose satellites to high levels of radiation and solar storms, which could knock them out of the sky, Solter-Hunt said. "It's a real Catch-22 for satellite companies," she added. "They could be weakening the magnetosphere with what they're doing, which in turn puts themselves at risk."

But even if the magnetosphere doesn't shrink, the increased levels of spacecraft dust could still make it harder for rockets to launch new satellites and other spacecraft into space, Solter-Hunt said. This is because the magnetic particles could interfere with onboard electronics, she added.

Worst-case scenario 

In Solter-Hunt's worst-case scenario, increased levels of radiation bombarding the upper ionosphere could begin to blow away the outer edges of our atmosphere — a phenomenon known as "atmospheric stripping," which has naturally occurred on planets like Mars and Mercury. 

But this would be the "most extreme case" and may take centuries, if not millennia, to occur, she added.

Related: NASA and Japan to launch world's 1st wooden satellite as soon as 2024. Why?

But even if the atmosphere remains intact, spacecraft dust could still damage it.

Past studies have suggested that some of this pollution, particularly alumina (aluminum oxide), could deplete atmospheric ozone, potentially increasing the size of the ozone holes above Earth's polar regions.

The magnetosphere is also undergoing some natural weakening as the Earth's core grows and solidifies, and nobody knows if spacecraft dust could accelerate this process or not.  

'Important first step'

Some researchers praise the new paper for highlighting hidden potential issues of spacecraft dust. 

"This work is a really important first step" and highlights the "terrifying" amount of spacecraft dust that could be deposited in the atmosphere, Samantha Lawler, an astronomer at the University of Regina in Canada, told Live Science in an email. "The consequences [of this pollution] could also be on a totally different scale than we're used to thinking about," she added.

Related: SpaceX rockets keep tearing blood-red 'atmospheric holes' in the sky, and scientists are concerned

However, other experts think that the scenarios laid out by Solter-Hunt are too speculative or based on flawed assumptions. 

"Even at the densities [of spacecraft dust] discussed, a continuous conductive shell like a true magnetic shield is unlikely," John Tarduno, a planetary scientist and magnetosphere expert at the University of Rochester in New York, told Live Science in an email. Some of the assumptions in the paper are also "too simple and unlikely to be correct," he added.

In particular, no one has modeled how spacecraft dust will settle in the atmosphere, how long it will last or how conductive it will be, meaning there is no proof that magnetic shielding is possible, José Ferreira, a doctoral candidate at the University of Southern California who is also studying space dust pollution, told Live Science in an email. 

The number of potential satellites orbiting Earth in the future also "seems exaggerated," as many touted satellite launches never occur, Fionagh Thompson, a research fellow at Durham University in England who specializes in space ethics, told Live Science in an email. 

The paper is an "interesting thought experiment," Thompson added. But without clearly outlining exactly how spacecraft dust will cause these problems, "it shouldn't be passed off as 'this is what is going to happen'," she said. 

Solter-Hunt understands the researchers' criticism. However, due to the imminent rise in satellite launches, she wanted to share her theories with the scientific community. "I put it there so everyone can see it and talk about it," she said.

And, despite their reservations about this paper, the experts all agree that more research is urgently needed to study the possible effects of metal pollution in the atmosphere.

"This is not an issue to be ignored," Thompson said. "There is a need to step back and view this [space junk pollution] as a completely new phenomenon." 

"There's a desperate need to study this as fast as possible," Lawler added. "Honestly, I don't think anyone knows what could happen." 

SpaceX has set a new launch record.

The company sent 21 of its Starlink internet satellites to orbit  on Sept. 3 atop a Falcon 9 rocket from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 10:47 p.m. EDT (0247 GMT on Sept. 4).

It was SpaceX's 62nd orbital mission of 2023, setting a new record for most flights in a year, according to company founder and CEO Elon Musk. The old mark was set in 2022.

The Falcon 9's first stage came back to Earth as planned. It touched down about 8.5 minutes after liftoff on the drone ship Just Read the Instructions, which was stationed in the Atlantic Ocean.

It was the 10th launch and landing for this particular booster, according to a SpaceX mission description. 

The Falcon 9's upper stage, meanwhile, kept on flying  to deploy the 21 Starlink satellites into low Earth orbit (LEO) about 65 minutes after liftoff.

The launch was part of a big day for SpaceX. The company also brought home the four astronauts of its Crew-6 mission, who had been at the International Space Station (ISS) since March.

Crew-6's Crew Dragon capsule, named Endeavour, departed the ISS a little after 7 a.m. EDT (1100 GMT) on Sept. 3. It successfully splashed down in the ocean off the Florida coast at around 12:17 a.m. EDT (0417 GMT). You can watch that milestone on YouTube, courtesy of NASA.

SpaceX's Starlink satellites are leaking radiation into the night sky as they circle Earth, which could be interfering with astronomers' attempts to pick up radio signals arriving from the farthest reaches of the cosmos, a new study shows.

All satellites, including those in SpaceX's rapidly growing Starlink constellation, emit and receive radio waves to and from our planet to communicate with their operators on the ground. Radio astronomers have known about this for years and can mitigate the impacts these controlled beams have on their work by avoiding these satellites' locations or accounting for the signals when making calculations. 

But in the new study, published July 3 in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, researchers have shown that Starlink satellites also emit unintended and previously unrecognized radio signals that are separate from the signals they send to and receive from our planet. Some of these signals overlap with those detected by the dishes of radio telescopes — which represents a new problem in this scientific field.

The unintended radiation leak had been theorized previously, but this is the first time it has been observed directly, study lead author Federico Di Vruno, co-director of the International Astronomical Union's Centre for the Protection of the Dark and Quiet Sky from Satellite Constellation Interference, said in a statement.

Related: Geomagnetic storm sends 40 SpaceX satellites plummeting to Earth

In the study, researchers used the Low-Frequency Array (LOFAR) telescope — an array of radio dishes located primarily in the Netherlands, as well as in seven other European countries — to closely monitor the emissions of 68 Starlink satellites.

The team found that 47 of the satellites were emitting unintended radiation with a frequency between 110 and 188 megahertz. "This frequency range includes a protected band between 150.05 and 153 MHz specifically allocated to radio astronomy by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU)," study co-author Cees Bassa, an astronomer at the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy, said in the statement.

However, SpaceX is not breaking any rules because the ITU's legislation only prevents terrestrial-based radio sources from transmitting in these wavelengths near radio telescopes. 

SpaceX likely isn't the only culprit; the researchers expect to detect similar emissions from many other satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO). The problem also could worsen as the number of private satellites in LEO continues to increase dramatically. For example, there were only 2,000 Starlink satellites in LEO when the data was collected, but there are now more than 4,000.

"Our simulations show that the larger the constellation, the more important this effect becomes as the radiation from all satellites adds up," study co-author Gyula Józsa, an astronomer at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Germany, said in the statement. "This makes us not only worried about the existing constellations, but even more about the planned ones."

The study team has already begun speaking to SpaceX about how the company can help mitigate the problem in the future, and so far, talks have progressed positively, researchers wrote in the statement. However, many other private companies also will need to consider the issue, they added. The teams are calling for new regulations that will bring space-based radio emissions in line with terrestrial ones.

Emitting radio signals is not the only way that satellites can interfere with astronomy. The shiny spacecraft can also reflect light back toward the planet's surface, which can leave white streaks across time-lapse images. In December 2022, the International Astronomical Union warned that the world's largest communication satellite, known as BlueWalker 3, is creating interference that could "severely hamper progress in our understanding of the cosmos."

Chinese military researchers have called for the development of a "hard kill" weapon to destroy Elon Musk's Starlink satellite system if it threatens China's national security. 

The researchers drew attention to Starlink's "huge potential for military applications" and the need for China to develop countermeasures to surveill, disable or even destroy the growing satellite megaconstellation. Their paper was published last month in the journal China's Modern Defence Technology. A translated copy of the paper is available here.

Starlink is a broadband satellite internet network developed by Musk's SpaceX company that aims to beam internet access to customers anywhere in the world (as long as they have a Starlink satellite dish to connect to the satellites). Since the first Starlink satellites were launched in 2019, SpaceX has put more than 2,300 of them into low-Earth orbit, and the company plans to send up to 42,000 satellites into space to form a gigantic megaconstellation.

Related: Geomagnetic storm sends 40 SpaceX satellites plummeting to Earth

The Chinese researchers were particularly concerned by the potential military capabilities of the constellation, which they claim could be used to track hypersonic missiles; dramatically boost the data transmission speeds of U.S. drones and stealth fighter jets; or even ram into and destroy Chinese satellites. China has had some near misses with Starlink satellites already, having written to the U.N. last year to complain that the country's space station was forced to perform emergency maneuvers to avoid "close encounters" with Starlink satellites in July and October 2021.

"A combination of soft and hard kill methods should be adopted to make some Starlink satellites lose their functions and destroy the constellation's operating system," the researchers, led by Ren Yuanzhen, a researcher at the Beijing Institute of Tracking and Telecommunications, which is part of the Chinese military's Strategic Support Force, wrote in the paper. Hard and soft kill are the two categories of space weapons, with hard kill being weapons that physically strike their targets (like missiles) and soft kill including jamming and laser weapons. 

China already has multiple methods for disabling satellites. These include microwave jammers that can disrupt communications or fry electrical components; powerful, millimeter-resolution lasers that can nab high-resolution images and blind satellite sensors; cyber-weapons to hack into satellite networks; and long-range anti-satellite (ASAT) missiles to destroy them, according to the U.S. Department of Defense. But the researchers say that these measures, which are effective against individual satellites, won't be enough to scuttle Starlink. 

"The Starlink constellation constitutes a decentralised system. The confrontation is not about individual satellites, but the whole system," the researchers wrote. The researchers also outlined how an attack on the Starlink system would require "some low-cost, high-efficiency measures."

Exactly what these measures could be remains unclear. The researchers propose that China should build its own spy satellites to better snoop on Starlink; find new and improved ways to hack its systems; and develop more efficient methods to down multiple satellites in the network. This could potentially mean the deployment of lasers, microwave weapons or smaller satellites that could be used to swarm Starlink's satellites. China is also looking to compete with Starlink directly through the launch of its own satellite network. Called Xing Wang, or Starnet, it also aims to provide global internet access to paying customers.

Starlink has been used for military purposes before. Just two days after Russia's invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, Ukrainian Vice Prime Minister Mykhailo Fedorov wrote on Twitter asking Musk to deploy more Starlink satellites to the country. Speaking at the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland, on May 24, Fedorov said that SpaceX has so far provided more than 12,000 Starlink satellite dishes to Ukraine, while adding that "all critical infrastructure [in Ukraine] uses Starlink." 

Earlier this month, Elon Musk wrote on Twitter that Russia had made multiple signal-jamming and hacking attempts on Starlink. A note from Dmitry Rogozin, the director of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, to Russian media also appeared to threaten Musk, accusing him of supplying "militants of the Nazi Azov battalion" with "military communication equipment" and claimed that Musk would be held accountable. Musk responded by writing on Twitter, "If I die under mysterious circumstances, it's been nice knowin ya."

China may be looking at alternative ways to counter Starlink because ASAT missiles create hazardous conditions for all nations operating in space. Explosions in orbit are dangerous not just on their own, but also because of the many thousands of debris pieces they create (ranging from basketball-size to as small as a grain of sand). This space shrapnel has the potential to cause serious damage to satellites. In November 2021, a Russian anti-satellite missile test blew up a defunct Soviet-era spy satellite in low-Earth orbit and created a debris field of at least 1,632 pieces that forced U.S. astronauts aboard the International Space Station to hide in their docked capsule, according to a U.S. Space Force database of orbital objects.

The U.S., China, India and Russia have all carried out ASAT tests in the past, creating space junk in the process. The U.S. announced a ban on further ASAT tests in April. In October 2021, Chinese scientists claimed to have designed a way to avoid the debris problem with an explosive device that could be packed inside a satellite's exhaust nozzle, safely blowing up the satellite without making any mess and in a way that could be mistaken for an engine malfunction.

According to a recently released report from the U.S. Department of Defense, China has more than doubled its number of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) satellites since 2019, from 124 to 250. At the beginning of 2022, China's total number of satellites, including non-ISR ones, was 499, second only to the United States' 2,944, of which Starlink makes up more than 2,300, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Originally published on Live Science.

In 2019, SpaceX launched the first 60 satellites of Starlink. Since then, over 2,000 have reaches orbit, set to become part of a constellation of more than 12,000. Known as Starlink, the project aims to bring high-speed internet to every corner of the planet.

SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk announced the Starlink concept in Jan. 2015, explaining the company intended to launch only about 4,000 broadband satellites into low-Earth orbit to provide low-cost internet. For perspective, there were only about 2,000 operational satellites in orbit before Starlink, and humanity have launched only around 9,000 craft into space in all of history.

Currently, fast internet access is only available in places with fibre optic cables. In remote locations, communications satellites provide links to the internet, but the connections are notoriously slow. 

Satellite positioning

These satellites sit in geostationary orbit, meaning they travel  at the same speed as Earth's rotation and therefore remain positioned above the same point on the ground, according to the European Space Agency (ESA). This makes it easy for receiving satellite dishes to connect with them, but  the downside is that transferring data in this way takes time. 

SpaceX aims to change that by surrounding Earth with low-orbiting satellites, according to Starlink.com. Individually they won’t cover as much of Earth's surface, and they won’t be geostationary, so there will need to be thousands of them to ensure complete coverage of the globe. But, because they fly low, it will cut the time it takes for a signal to travel from the ground to space and back again.

Achieving this is no mean feat. The closer a satellite is to Earth, the more drag it will experience from the edges of the atmosphere. To get around this, SpaceX has designed the satellites to look like vertical shark–fins, according to their website, with a knife-like edge that cuts through the wind. 

Each one weighs just 550 pounds (250 kilograms), and it works a bit like a router. Its job is simply to receive signals, work out where they're going, and pass them on. On the ground, users will have special dishes that lock on to whichever satellite is closest.

How does it work?

Starlink controversy

The project is not without controversy. Each satellite has a solar array that sticks out like a wing. At sunrise and sunset, it catches the light, making it glint like a shooting star. As the constellation moves overhead, it leaves streaks on telescope images, obscuring the stars and planets behind. Space X has been working with astronomers to minimize the impact by shading and tilting the satellites to reduce the light reflected back towards Earth, according to Space.com.

The high-profile project most likely to be affected is the Vera Rubin Observatory, scheduled to come online in October 2023 in the Chilean Andes, according to Space.com. This will be impacted by bright satellite trails because of its wide field of view and high sensitivity.

The satellites also pose a potential threat to other orbiting objects, Live Science previously reported. They are already responsible for over half of close encounters in Earth’s orbit, and that proportion is only set to rise, Live Science previously reported. 

In December 2021, the Chinese government lodged a formal complaint with the United Nations after two near-misses with the China Space Station, Space.com reported. And, with at least 11 other companies already entering the satellite constellation race, space is likely to get more complicated and more crowded in years to come. 

Additional resources

To learn more about the goals of Starlink internet, you can visit the satellite page at Starlink.com. Additionally, you can read more details about the Starlink internet speed and coverage at Tom's Guide. 

Bibliography

• "Types of orbits". The European Space Agency (2020).
• "World's most advanced broadband internet system". Starlink (2022). 
• "Astronomy discussion with National Academy of Sciences". SpaceX (2020). 

OneWeb, a satellite company partly controlled by the U.K. government, has announced a new partnership with SpaceX after being banned from using Russian rockets following Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

Under the new deal, SpaceX will launch an unspecified number of OneWeb satellites later this year, adding to its growing constellation of 428 of the planned total of 648 low-Earth orbit satellites. OneWeb's program, similar to SpaceX's Starlink initiative, aims to create a mega-constellation of thousands of satellites to provide broadband internet coverage to customers around the world. 

OneWeb had to abandon its previous launch plan to send a batch of 36 satellites to space aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket, after an ultimatum made by Dmitry Rogozin, the director of the Russian Space agency Roscosmos. Rogozin demanded that for the launch to take place, the British government should completely divest its $500 million stake from OneWeb and the company should provide a guarantee that its satellites would not be used for military purposes. OneWeb and the U.K. refused to accept the demands and suspended all further satellite launches from the Roscosmos launch site at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. 

Related: Here's every spaceship that's ever carried an astronaut into orbit

"We thank SpaceX for their support, which reflects our shared vision for the boundless potential of space," OneWeb's chief executive, Neil Masterson said in a statement. "With these launch plans in place, we're on track to finish building out our full fleet of satellites and deliver robust, fast, secure connectivity around the globe."

The U.K. government took a 20% stake in OneWeb in July 2020, investing to save the company from bankruptcy after it failed to secure private funding. The purchase made the British state a major shareholder alongside OneWeb's majority shareholder, the Indian telecommunications company Bharti Global, which owns a 40% controlling share.  

The U.K.'s ostensible reason for investing in the company was to replace the European Union's Galileo Navigation system, which the country lost access to after Brexit. The British government said it was going to use the OneWeb satellites to build an alternative to Galileo, but this plan was later described as "nonsensical" by experts, who said that the satellites made by OneWeb are totally different from those made for navigation systems.

"We've bought the wrong satellites," Bleddyn Bowen, a space policy expert at the University of Leicester, told the Guardian after the purchase.

The details of the new deal between both companies have been kept confidential, but SpaceX quotes its price to send a Falcon 9 rocket into space at $67 million, a figure which the Elon Musk company says increased in March from the earlier rate of $62 million "to account for excessive levels of inflation."

OneWeb and SpaceX are competitors in the satellite broadband market, as SpaceX has sent 1,200 out of a planned 42,000 Starlink satellites into orbit. The companies say their megaconstellations will provide internet access to underserved regions of the world, but astronomers have warned that the bright trails the satellites leave in the sky could pose a significant risk to future astronomical research, Live Science previously reported.

Rozogin replied to OneWeb's announcement on Twitter on Tuesday (March 22) with an image of a snake swallowing a rat along with the caption "Bon appetit," a possible allusion to OneWeb's reliance on the rockets of a competitor.

Originally published on Live Science.

SpaceX successfully launched a new batch of Starlink internet satellites on Wednesday (March 9), marking the company's 10th launch in as many weeks. 

A two-stage Falcon 9 rocket launched 48 Starlink satellites into orbit from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at 8:45 a.m. EST (1545 GMT). The rocket's first stage then returned to Earth for a smooth touchdown at sea on the SpaceX droneship A Shortfall of Gravitas.

"Time to let the American broomstick fly and hear the sounds of freedom," SpaceX's launch director said just before launch. The call was an apparent response to Russian space agency chief Dmitry Rogozin, who said "let them fly on something else, their broomsticks" last week after Russia halted sales of its rocket engines to U.S. launch providers amid economic sanctions following that country's invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24.

Related: The 12 strangest objects in the universe

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has leaned into Rogozin's comments, calling the Falcon 9 — the workhorse vehicle of SpaceX's reusable fleet — as a dependable "American broomstick" in  a Twitter post last week. SpaceX has also provided Starlink terminals to Ukraine to help restore communications and internet service across the country and is focusing on cybersecurity to prevent jamming of those terminals.

"Another 48 Starlinks just reached orbit," Musk wrote on Twitter Wednesday after the successful launch. 

Starlink is the giant constellation of broadband satellites that SpaceX is assembling in low Earth orbit. The company has already launched more than 2,000 Starlink craft since 2019, and many more will go up in the relatively near future. 

SpaceX has permission to launch 12,000 Starlink satellites and has applied for approval for up to 30,000 more. Wednesday's Starlink mission, called Starlink 4-10, marked the 41st flight for the megaconstellation. 

Last month, SpaceX lost nearly an entire batch of Starlink satellites due to a solar storm that caused dozens of Starlinks to fall from space and burn up in Earth's atmosphere days after launch. SpaceX has since increased its initial deployment altitude to avoid similar incidents from recurring. 

Wednesday's launch marked the fourth flight and landing for its particular Falcon 9 first stage, SpaceX has said. The booster also launched the Arabsat-6A mission in April 2019, the Space Test Program-2 (STP-2) flight for the U.S. military in June 2019 and the Italian Earth-observation satellite COSMO-SkyMed Second Generation FM2 in January.

The first two missions on that list — Arabsat-6A and STP-2 — were flown by SpaceX's huge Falcon Heavy rocket, which consists of three Falcon 9 cores strapped together, the central one topped by a second stage. COSMO-SkyMed Second Generation FM2 was flown by a Falcon 9.

Mike Wall is the author of "Out There" (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or on Facebook.  

SpaceX's Starlink internet is now active in Ukraine. But will the company be able to keep it online? 

Russia's attacks on Ukraine continue to take lives and destroy infrastructure as the country invades. This infrastructure damage has disrupted internet access in Ukraine, leading a government official to publicly request Starlink satellite internet access for the country from SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. Musk obliged, activating Starlink service in Ukraine and sending additional hardware. But with continued attacks on infrastructure, how will Ukraine stay connected? 

"@elonmusk @SpaceX @SpaceXStarlink many thx! Starlink keeps our cities connected and emergency services saving lives! With Russian attacks on our infra, we need generators to keep Starlinks & life-saving services online — ideas?" Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine's vice prime minister and the country's minister of digital transformation, who made the original request of Musk, asked on Twitter today (March 2).

Related: Geomagnetic storm sends 40 SpaceX satellites plummeting to Earth

Fedorov brings up an important point: Even though Starlink operates without the need for traditional internet infrastructure, the Earth-bound hardware still needs power. And, as Russian attacks bombard the country, Ukraine's internet access will continue to be threatened. 

Fedorov's statement publicly reached out for help acquiring generators to keep Starlink online for Ukrainians. But Musk responded with an alternative suggestion.

"Solar panels + battery pack better than generator, as no heat signature or smoke & doesn't run out of fuel," Musk wrote in response on Twitter. 

Fedorov's concern also points to the importance of internet access for the country under attack.

Internet connection enables what Fedorov described as "life-saving" communication, whether that be among family members displaced and separated by a missile attack or first aid teams trying to locate an injured person. Internet access is a critical component for those in Ukraine fighting to survive the invasion.

Editor's note: Fedorov replied to Musk later today, stating:

"Good point - should work even with Ukrainian winters! We will keep you posted as we roll out more Starlinks across the country. THANK YOU again for helping us out with @SpaceXStarlink - this will save a lot of lives."

Russian criticism

Dmitry Rogozin, the director-general of Russia's space agency Roscosmos, has been publicly outspoken on Twitter about the effects of the war on outer space relations. Most recently, Rogozin announced that Roscosmos would halt UK-based internet satellite company OneWeb's launch, planned for Friday (March 4) aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket, if the company and the UK government did not meet certain demands.

Now, Rogozin is speaking out about SpaceX's provision of Starlink service to Ukraine, according to a statement translated and shared by space enthusiast Katya Pavlushchenko.

"When Russia implements its highest national interests on the territory of Ukraine, @elonmusk appears with his Starlink which was previously declared as purely civilian," Rogozin stated, both referring to the invasion as an implementation of national interests as well as referring to the country of Ukraine as a territory.

"I warned about it, but our "muskophiles" said — he is the light of the world [of] cosmonautics. Here, look, he has chosen the side. I don't even blame him personally. This is the West that we should never trust," Rogozin added.

Email Chelsea Gohd at cgohd@space.com or follow her on Twitter @chelsea_gohd. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

A powerful geomagnetic storm has doomed 40 Starlink satellites launched by SpaceX last week, the company has announced.

Elon Musk's company launched a Falcon 9 rocket bearing the 49 satellites from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Thursday (Feb. 3), but a geomagnetic storm that struck a day later sent the satellites plummeting back toward Earth, where they will burn up in the atmosphere.

"Unfortunately, the satellites deployed on Thursday were significantly impacted by a geomagnetic storm on Friday," SpaceX said in a statement. "Preliminary analysis show[s] 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 reenter or already have reentered the Earth's atmosphere."

Related: The 12 strangest objects in the universe

Geomagnetic storms occur when a surge of solar wind — charged particles from the sun — smashes into Earth's magnetic field and generates charged particles and currents in Earth's upper atmosphere. The surge warms the upper atmosphere and increases its atmospheric density such that the drag experienced by satellites in low Earth orbit can be enough to send them tumbling back to Earth. The geomagnetic storm experienced by the satellites came from solar wind kicked out by a Jan. 30 coronal mass ejection — an eruption of the sun. 

After launch, the 49 SpaceX satellites began orbiting as close to 130 miles (210 kilometers) from Earth. This low orbit was intentionally designed to make the satellites easily disposable in the event of a postlaunch failure, but the low orbit also left them vulnerable to the geomagnetic storm.

SpaceX said in the statement that the satellites' GPS systems show the storm caused atmospheric drag to "increase up to 50 per cent higher than during previous launches." In response, the satellites were commanded to "take cover from the storm" by flying "edge-on (like a sheet of paper)." This "edge-on" positioning, by decreasing the surface area of the satellite passing through the atmosphere, was an attempt to halt the rapid deceleration of the satellites.

But the drag was too much. 40 of the satellites are now set to plummet back to Earth. SpaceX assures the public that, because the company's satellites are designed to disintegrate upon reentry, "no orbital debris is created and no satellite parts hit the ground."

Since the first Starlink satellites were launched in 2019, SpaceX has put 2,000 of them into Earth orbit, and the company plans to place as many as 42,000 satellites into an Earth-orbiting megaconstellation

The Starlink program would give customers high-speed internet service from anywhere in the world, but it has come under sustained criticism from astronomers because its shiny satellites often leave bright streaks in the night sky, ruining astronomical observations. A 2021 study showed that the 9,300 tons (8,440 metric tons) of space objects currently orbiting Earth, including inoperative satellites and chunks of spent rocket stages, have increased the overall brightness of the night sky by more than 10%, rendering large parts of Earth light-polluted, Live Science previously reported.

Critics also say these SpaceX satellites clog up near-Earth orbital slots that could be used by other companies or countries. Space experts have even warned that once the first 12,000 satellites of Starlink's first-generation constellation are in orbit, they could become responsible for up to 90% of near misses between two spacecraft in low Earth orbit, Live Science sister site Space.com reported. In December 2021, the director general of the European Space Agency, Josef Aschbacher, said Musk was "making the rules" in space, and he called for the European Union and other countries to coordinate so that SpaceX's satellites did not prevent others from launching their own.

Originally published on Live Science.

Not so long ago, at the dawn of the Space Age, there were just a handful of human-made satellites circling Earth. But now, roughly 70 years later, there are thousands of spacecraft swarming around our planet — and many more waiting to be launched almost every day.

But just how many satellites are already in orbit around Earth? How many could potentially join them? And what sort of problems could they cause once they are all up there?

For many decades, the number of satellites being launched into space remained fairly constant. Since the first ever human-made satellite, Sputnik, entered orbit in 1957, between 50 and 100 satellites were launched into space every year. This continued until the 2010s, when the emergence of private space companies like SpaceX triggered an increase in the number of launches, which have continued to rise sharply. In 2024, a rocket was launched every 34 hours on average, putting more than 2,800 satellites into orbit.

As of May 2025, there are roughly 11,700 active satellites in orbit around Earth, a majority of which are located in low-Earth orbit (LEO) — below 1,200 miles (2,000 kilometers) above our planet's surface, Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who has been tracking satellites since 1989, told Live Science.

However, the total number of satellites, including those that have stopped working and are either waiting to be deorbited or have been moved to an elevated "graveyard orbit," could be as high as 14,900, according to data from the United Nations' Office for Outer Space Affairs, although this number is harder to properly track.

Related: Where does the solar system end?

But this is just the beginning: Some experts predict that the number of active satellites could increase almost tenfold before eventually leveling out. If this does happen, it could create numerous problems for astronomy, space exploration and the environment.

"It causes a space traffic management problem, it will exacerbate the proliferation of space debris, it is interfering with astronomy and stargazing, and the rocket launches and reentries cause atmospheric pollution," Aaron Boley, an astronomer at The University of British Columbia who has previously studied these effects, told Live Science. "We're still trying to understand the extent of the impacts."

Rising numbers

The exponential rise in satellite numbers is largely the result of "megaconstellations" — giant networks of satellites built by private companies, such as SpaceX's Starlink constellation, that aim to provide communications services across the globe.

For example, as of May 2025, roughly 7,400 active Starlink satellites are orbiting Earth, which account for more than 60% of the total number of active satellites, according to McDowell. All of these have been launched since May 2019.

SpaceX may be leading the way, but other organizations are hot on their heels, including Eutelsat's OneWeb constellation, AST's SpaceMobile network, Amazon's upcoming Project Kuiper and China's "Thousand Sails" constellation, among others.

It is hard to predict exactly how many satellites will be launched and when. However, researchers can predict the maximum number of satellites that can safely orbit our planet. This total, known as the carrying capacity, will likely be the upper limit of how many active satellites can coexist at once, without constantly smashing into one another.

McDowell and Boley, as well as other astronomers — including Federico Di Vruno at the transnational Square Kilometer Array (SKA) Observatory and Benjamin Winkel at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Germany — all believe that the carrying capacity for LEO will likely extend up to 100,000 active satellites. At this point, new satellites will likely only be launched to replace those that eventually die and fall back to Earth.

It is unclear when this carrying capacity will be reached. However, based on the current rate of increasing launches, several experts predict that it could happen before 2050.

Potential issues

The sheer number of satellites expected to orbit our planet will likely impact us in several ways.

One of the major issues associated with satellites is space junk. Although most modern rockets are at least partly reusable, they still use boosters that get discarded in LEO and can drift there for years before reentering the atmosphere. If these pieces collide with one another, satellites or larger spacecraft, like the International Space Station, they can create thousands of smaller pieces of debris, which increase the likelihood of further collisions.

Related: Is there an 'up' and a 'down' in space?

If left unchecked, this could create a cascade of collisions that render LEO effectively unusable and limit our ability to expand out into the solar system. Researchers call this problem the "Kessler syndrome" and are already warning that it should be tackled now, before it is too late.

Satellites also reflect light to Earth's surface, which is already causing headaches for optical astronomers. The brightest objects can photobomb telescope images with large streaks of light as they move across a camera's field of view during long exposure photos, interfering with observations of distant objects.

Hidden pollution, such as radiation leaking from Starlink satellites, is also impacting radio astronomy. If the carrying capacity is reached, some experts fear that the level of radio interference could render some types of radio astronomy completely impossible.

Rocket launches also release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, which contribute to human-caused climate change. A single launch can release up to 10 times more carbon than an average commercial plane flight, although they are significantly less frequent.

Satellites can also impact the environment in other ways. As the old saying goes, "what goes up must come down" — and satellites are no exception. Emerging research has suggested that when spacecraft burn up upon reentry, they release large amounts of metallic pollution into the atmosphere. While this area of study is still young, some scientists have suggested that megaconstellations could deposit enough metal in our skies to potentially disrupt Earth's magnetic field, with potentially catastrophic results.

Although private satellites can also provide useful services, such as connecting rural and disadvantaged communities to high-speed internet, many experts question whether the benefits outweigh the potential dangers. At the very least, most experts agree that we should reduce the number of launches until we have a better idea of what's going on.

"I don't think a full stop on satellite launches would work," Boley said. "However, slowing things down and delaying the placement of 100,000 satellites until we have better international rules would be prudent."

Editor's note: This article was originally published on Nov. 14, 2021 and updated on May 18, 2025 at 11:00 a.m. ET to reflect changes in the number of orbiting satellites and add new research into the potential impacts of megaconstellations.

Operators of satellite constellations are constantly forced to move their satellites because of encounters with other spacecraft and pieces of space junk. And, thanks to SpaceX's Starlink satellites, the number of such dangerous approaches will continue to grow, according to estimates based on available data.

SpaceX's Starlink satellites alone are involved in about 1,600 close encounters between two spacecraft every week, according to Hugh Lewis, the head of the Astronautics Research Group at the University of Southampton, U.K. These encounters include situations when two spacecraft pass within a distance of 0.6 miles (1 kilometer) from each other.

Lewis, Europe's leading expert on space debris, makes regular estimates of the situation in orbit based on data from the Socrates (Satellite Orbital Conjunction Reports Assessing Threatening Encounters in Space ) database. This tool, managed by Celestrack, provides information about satellite orbits and models their trajectories into the future to assess collision risk. 

Space Junk Clean Up: 7 Wild Ways to Destroy Orbital Debris

Lewis publishes regular updates on Twitter and has seen a worrying trend in the data that reflects the fast deployment of the Starlink constellation. 

"I have looked at the data going back to May 2019 when Starlink was first launched to understand the burden of these megaconstellations," Lewis told Space.com. "Since then, the number of encounters picked up by the Socrates database has more than doubled and now we are in a situation where Starlink accounts for half of all encounters."

The current 1,600 close passes include those between two Starlink satellites. Excluding these encounters, Starlink satellites approach other operators’ spacecraft 500 times every week. 

Related: New spacecraft sustainability rating targets space junk

In comparison, Starlink's competitor OneWeb, currently flying over 250 satellites, is involved in 80 close passes with other operators' satellites every week, according to Lewis' data.

And the situation is bound to get worse. Only 1,700 satellites of an expected constellation of tens of thousands have been placed into orbit so far. Once SpaceX launches all 12,000 satellites of its first generation constellation, Starlink satellites will be involved in 90% of all close approaches, Lewis’ calculations suggest.

The risk of collision

Siemak Heser, CEO and co-founder of Boulder, Colorado, based Kayhan Space, confirms the trend. His company, which develops a commercial autonomous space traffic management system, estimates that on average, an operator managing about 50 satellites will receive up to 300 official conjunction alerts a week. These alerts include encounters with other satellites as well as pieces of debris. Out of these 300 alerts, up to ten would require operators to perform avoidance maneuvers, Hesar told Space.com.

Kayhan Space bases their estimates on data provided by the U.S. Space Surveillance Network. This network of radars and telescopes, managed by the U.S. Space Force, closely monitors about 30,000 live and defunct satellites and pieces of debris down to the size of 4 inches (10 centimeters) and provides the most accurate location data of the orbiting objects. 

The size of this catalog is expected to increase ten times in the near future, Hesar added, partly due to the growth of megaconstellations, such as Starlink, and partly as sensors improve and enable detection of even smaller objects. The more objects in the catalog mean more dangerously close encounters. 

"This problem is really getting out of control," Hesar said. "The processes that are currently in place are very manual, not scalable, and there is not enough information sharing between parties that might be affected if a collision happens."

Hesar compared the problem to driving on a highway and not knowing that there has been an accident a few miles ahead of you. If two spacecraft collide in orbit, the cloud of debris the crash generates would threaten other satellites travelling through the same area.

"You want to have that situational awareness for the other actors that are flying in the neighbourhood," Hesar said.

Related: The worst space debris events of all time

Bad decisions

Despite the concerns, only three confirmed orbital collisions have happened so far. Earlier this week, astrophysicist and satellite tracker Jonathan McDowell, who's based at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, found evidence in Space-Track data that the Chinese meteorological satellite Yunhai 1-02, which disintegrated in March this year, was actually hit by a piece of space debris. 

The worst known space collision in history took place in February 2009 when the U.S. telecommunication satellite Iridium 33 and Russia's defunct military satellite Kosmos-2251 crashed at the altitude of 490 miles (789 kilometres). The incident spawned over 1,000 pieces of debris larger than 4 inches (10 cm). Many of these fragments were then involved in further orbital incidents. 

Lewis is concerned that with the number of close passes growing, the risk of operators at some point making a wrong decision will grow as well. Avoidance maneuvers cost fuel, time and effort. Operators, therefore, always carefully evaluate such risks. A decision not to make an avoidance maneuver following an alert, such as that made by Iridium in 2009, could, however, clutter the orbital environment for years and decades. 

"In a situation when you are receiving alerts on a daily basis, you can't maneuver for everything," Lewis said. "The maneuvers use propellant, the satellite cannot provide service. So there must be some threshold. But that means you are accepting a certain amount of risk. The problem is that at some point, you are likely to make a wrong decision."

Hesar said that uncertainties in the positions of satellites and pieces of debris are still considerable. In case of operational satellites, the error could be up to 330 feet (100 meters) large. When it comes to a piece of debris, the uncertainty about its exact position might be in the order of a mile or more. 

"This object can be anywhere in this bubble of multiple kilometres," Hesar said. "At this point, and for the foreseeable future, avoidance is our best recourse. People that say 'I'm going to take the risk', in my humble opinion, that's an irresponsible thing to do."

Starlink monopoly 

Lewis is concerned about the growing influence of a single actor — Starlink — on the safety of orbital operations. Especially, he says, as the spaceflight company has entered the satellite operations world only recently. 

"We place trust in a single company, to do the right thing," Lewis said. "We are in a situation where most of the maneuvers we see will involve Starlink. They were a launch provider before, now they are the world's biggest satellite operator, but they have only been doing that for two years so there is a certain amount of inexperience."

SpaceX relies on an autonomous collision avoidance system to keep its fleet away from other spacecraft. That, however, could sometimes introduce further problems. The automatic orbital adjustments change the forecasted trajectory and therefore make collision predictions more complicated, according to Lewis.

"Starlink doesn't publicize all the maneuvers that they're making, but it is believed that they are making a lot of small corrections and adjustments all the time," Lewis said. "But that causes problems for everybody else because no one knows where the satellite is going to be and what it is going to do in the next few days."

Follow Tereza Pultarova on Twitter @TerezaPultarova. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook. 

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched 60 Starlink internet satellites into orbit early Sunday (May 9) and then stuck a landing at sea to cap a record 10th flight for the company's reusable booster.

The veteran Falcon 9 rocket blasted off before dawn from Space Launch Complex 40 here at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 2:42 a.m. EDT (0642 GMT), marking the company's 14th launch of the year. It was also one for the record books as the flight was this particular booster's 10th launch and landing attempt. The rocket's once pristine exterior was almost black, charred by its many trips to orbit and back. 

"First time a Falcon rocket booster will reach double digits in flights," SpaceX CEO Elon Musk wrote on Twitter Saturday before launch.

Related: SpaceX's Starlink satellite megaconstellation launches in photos 

The successful liftoff marked the second time SpaceX launched one of its 229-foot-tall (70 meters) workhorse Falcon 9 rockets within the same week, each carrying a full stack of 60 flat-paneled Starlink broadband satellites. 

"SpaceX's first reuse of an orbital class rocket was on the SES-10 mission way back in March of 2017," Spacex supply chain supervisor Michael Andrews said in a live webcast. "We've certainly come a long way since then."

Approximately nine minutes after liftoff, the rocket's first stage returned to Earth, touching down on SpaceX's drone ship "Just Read the Instructions" for a record 10th successful landing. 

Onlookers were treated to quite the spectacle as the rocket lit up the pre-dawn sky as it climbed to orbit. Clear skies above Florida's Space Coast made for prime viewing conditions. 

In photos: SpaceX launches, lands 1st reused Falcon 9 rocket

In 2020, SpaceX launched a record 26 rockets, and the company is showing no signs of slowing down. So far this year, the Hawthorne, California-based rocket builder has launched 14 missions. Every one of those launches has been on reused rockets, and most have carried SpaceX's own Starlink satellites. 

Last month, SpaceX celebrated the launch of its third astronaut mission in less than a year as the private spaceflight company delivered a crew of four astronauts to the International Space Station. That mission, called Crew-2, was SpaceX's first crewed mission to fly on a reused rocket. 

Of its 14 missions this year, 11 have carried Starlink satellites into orbit. SpaceX has already filled its initial internet constellation of 1,440 broadband satellites. However, the company has approval to launch thousands more and is relying on its fleet of flight-proven boosters to help it do so.  

SpaceX's 1st 'Block 5' Falcon 9 rocket: The launch photos

 Reusable rocket milestone

The booster used in Sunday's launch, called B1051, is one of SpaceX's fleet leaders. The veteran flier now has 10 launches and landings under its belt as the company has plans to push its Falcon 9 rockets to the limit. It's the first booster in SpaceX's fleet to reach this milestone. (Another booster, B1049, just launched on its ninth mission earlier in the week.)

This Falcon 9 made its debut in 2019, launching an uncrewed Crew Dragon capsule on the Demo-1 mission as part of a test flight for NASA's Commercial Crew program. The booster also launched a trio of Earth-observing satellites for Canada, a broadband satellite for Sirius-XM and seven different Starlink missions. 

SpaceX has been using its previously flown boosters with the most miles to transport its own satellites into space. That way the company can push its fleet of Falcons to the limit while also learning as much about the wear and tear each vehicle receives during launch. 

This is the 118th overall flight for Falcon 9, and the 64th flight of a refurbished booster. In fact, every single SpaceX launch so far in 2021 has been on a flight-proven rocket. 

In 2018, SpaceX debuted the rocket we see today, a version of Falcon 9 known as Block 5. This more capable Falcon 9 has ushered in an era of rapid reusability for the company, enabling SpaceX to launch more rockets than ever before. 

Three years ago, SpaceX CEO and founder Elon Musk told reporters that the company expected each Falcon 9 to fly 10 times with few refurbishments in between flights, and as many as 100 times before retirement. 

B1051 is the first to make it to the historic 10-flight milestone, and is expected to fly again, following its successful landing at sea. According to Musk, there doesn't appear to be a hard limit on the number of times a booster can be reused, so the company will continue pushing each Falcon to its limit. 

Having a fleet of flight-proven rockets at its disposal allows SpaceX to keep up with its rapid launch cadence. However, SpaceX chooses to fly its own payload on boosters with a high flight count, saving its newer boosters for paying customers. 

Both NASA and the U.S. Space Force recently granted the company approval to fly their payloads on reused rockets, and we saw the first of those missions blast off on April 23, with the launch of Crew-2. (SpaceX has flown other NASA missions on reused boosters, but April's flight marked the first time a human mission has done so.)

To facilitate reuse, SpaceX outfitted its Falcon 9 with some upgrades previous versions did not have, including a more robust thermal protections system, a more durable interstage (the part that connects the rocket's first stage to the upper stage), titanium grid fins, and more powerful engines. These key enhancements, along with two drone ships on the same coast, have enabled SpaceX to launch and land more rockets. 

 Starlink constellation grows 

SpaceX created its massive internet constellation with one major goal: to provide internet coverage to the world, in particular to those in remote and rural areas. To that end, company engineers designed a fleet of flat-paneled broadband satellites to fly over the Earth, beaming down internet coverage to users who can access the service via a compact user terminal.

With Sunday's launch success, SpaceX has launched more than 1,600 Starlink satellites into orbit, including some that are no longer operational. This goes beyond the company's initial quota, which means we should see an official commercial rollout of the Starlink internet service sometime this year.

The company has already proven useful to those in remote areas. SpaceX has connected school districts in Virginia and North Carolina that would otherwise struggle with online learning, as well as the Hoh tribe in Washington State and the Pikangikum nation in Western Ontario. 

Starlink review (hands-on): How good is Elon Musk's satellite internet service? 

Currently, Starlink is still in its beta-testing phase with users around the world putting the service through its paces. The company has also opened up its website to begin taking preorders, although service won't begin right away. Prospective users can go to the company's website and reserve the service with a $99 deposit right now.

According to company officials, more than 500,000 users have signed up for the burgeoning service so far. 

Rocket fairing recovery

Both of the fairing halves featured in Tuesday's mission will be recovered by the newest member of SpaceX's recovery fleet, Shelia Bordelon. The company officially bid farewell to its dynamic duo — GO Ms. Tree and GO Ms. Chief — last month. The twin fairing catchers helped SpaceX pioneer its fairing recovery efforts. 

The rocket's nose cone (also called a fairing), is a piece of clamshell-like hardware that protects the payload as the rocket races through the atmosphere. Once it reaches a certain altitude, the pieces jettison, and fall back to Earth.

Historically, the hardware was discarded in the ocean, never to be used again. However, thanks to onboard parachutes and navigation software, SpaceX began to recover the fairings, either by catching them in a net-equipped boat or scooping them out of the water. 

With the help of its onboard crane, the brightly painted Shelia Bordelon will retrieve the fairings from the water and return them to port. From there, they will be refurbished and prepared for their next mission. 

Follow Amy Thompson on Twitter @astrogingersnap. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched a new batch of 60 Starlink internet satellites into orbit on Wednesday evening (April 28) and nailed a landing at sea to top off a successful mission. 

The veteran Falcon 9 rocket blasted off from Space Launch Complex 40 here at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at 11:44 p.m. EDT (0344 April 29 GMT), marking the company's 10th launch of the year.

"The Falcon 9 first stage has landed for its seventh time," SpaceX engineer Jessie Anderson said during the launch broadcast. "This marks our 81st recovery of an orbital class rocket."

Approximately nine minutes later, the rocket's first stage returned to Earth, touching down on SpaceX's drone ship "Just Read the Instructions," for its seventh successful landing.

Video: SpaceX launches Starlink 24 mission! Nails booster landing at sea
Related: SpaceX's Starlink satellite megaconstellation launches in photos

The launch marked the third of the evening, as Arianespace launched a Vega rocket from Kourou, French Guiana roughly two hours earlier, at 9:50 p.m. EDT (0150 GMT on April 29). China then launched the core module of its next space station at 11:23 p.m. EST (0323 GMT on April 29), followed by SpaceX. 

SpaceX is continuing the rapid launch pace set last year, as the Hawthorne, California-based rocket builder celebrated its 12th launch so far in 2021. The majority of those launches have been SpaceX's own Starlink satellites, as the company surpasses its initial internet constellation of 1,440 broadband satellites.

That constellation could eventually be tens of thousands of satellites strong as SpaceX has permission to launch as many as 30,000, with an option for even more.

Forecasters at the 45th Space Wing's Weather Squadron predicted favorable conditions at launch and the weather did not disappoint. 

Rapid reuse

The booster for Wednesday's launch, called B1060, is one of SpaceX's fleet of flight-proven boosters. The veteran flier now has seven launches and landings under its belt as the company has plans to push its Falcon 9 rockets to the limit. 

B1060 made its debut in June 2020, when it carried an upgraded GPS III satellite into space for the U.S. Space Force. That mission was the first time that the military gave SpaceX the green light to go ahead and recover the booster. (Previously, all military missions flew on expendable rockets.)

Once the booster returned to Port, it was prepared for its next mission: to carry a stack of Starlink internet satellites into space. Following back-to-back Starlink missions, the veteran booster then carried a communications satellite into space for Turkey. 

Its subsequent missions have all contained Starlink payloads. Wednesday's flight marks the fifth load of the broadband satellites that this particular booster has carried into space. SpaceX has been using its previously flown boosters with the most miles to transport its own satellites into space. 

This is the 115th overall flight for Falcon 9, and the 61st flight of a used, refurbished booster. In fact, every single SpaceX launch so far in 2021 has been on a flight-proven rocket. 

When the upgraded Falcon 9 debuted in 2018, SpaceX Founder and CEO Elon Musk told reporters that the company expected each Falcon 9 to fly 10 times with few refurbishments in between flights, and as many as 100 times before retirement. 

The company has learned a lot through the refurbishment process, and according to Musk, there doesn't seem to be a hard limit on the number of flights that any given Falcon 9 can fly. 

"You probably don't want to be on a life leader for a crewed mission, but it's probably good to have a flight or two under its belt, for the booster to have flown once or twice," he said during a post-launch media call after the Crew-2 astronaut mission to the space station. "If it was an aircraft coming out of the factory, you'd want the aircraft to probably have gone through a test flight or two before you put passengers on."

"So I think that's probably a couple of flights is a good number for a crew booster, and in the meantime, we'll keep flying the life leader," Musk said. "We've got nine flights on one of the boosters. We're going to have a 10th flight soon with a Starlink mission."

Musk did indicate that the company would push the Falcons to the limit and keep flying them on Starlink missions until they break, which could well surpass the 10 flights previously predicted.

Having a fleet of flight-proven rockets at its disposal allows SpaceX to keep up with its rapid launch cadence. However, company officials have stressed that while losing a booster is unfortunate, the main objective of each mission is always to deliver the payload safely to its intended orbit. Anything beyond that is a bonus. 

Constellation expansion

With Wednesday's launch success, SpaceX has launched more than 1,500 Starlink satellites into orbit, which includes some that are no longer operational. This goes beyond the company's initial quota, but there are many more launches coming as the company has sought approval for tens of thousands more.

SpaceX launched its massive internet constellation, to help provide internet coverage to the world, in particular those in remote and rural areas. To that end, company engineers designed a fleet of flat-paneled broadband satellites to fly over the Earth, beaming down internet coverage to users who can access the service via a compact user terminal.

Currently Starlink is still in its beta-testing phase with users in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Germany and New Zealand able to access the service. The company is currently taking preorders for the internet service but is planning for a full rollout later this year. Prospective users can go to the company's website and reserve the service with a $99 deposit right now.

Starlink review: How good is Elon Musk's satellite internet service?

SpaceX is not the only company with aspirations of connecting the globe. OneWeb, Amazon and Telstar all have constellations of their own planned. However, OneWeb is currently the only other service with actual satellites in space. 

The London-based company launched 36 of its satellites last month on a Russian Soyuz as it works to fill out its planned constellation containing 650 satellites. (To date, OneWeb has launched five of its planned 19 missions.) 

There was a minor kerfuffle between SpaceX and OneWeb this month as OneWeb reported that one of its satellites had a 'close call' with one of SpaceX's Starlink satellites. More recent filings with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) have shed some light on the incident, showing that there was no potential collision and that the situation was exaggerated. 

SpaceX recently inked a deal with NASA to steer its satellites out of the way if there was any sort of close call with any one of the agency's satellites or the International Space Station. That only pertains to NASA though; currently there's no global or national regulation that would mandate one company to move its satellites out of the way of another entity. 

In 2020, the space station had to adjust its orbit a number of times to avoid potential collisions with objects in orbit. So the creation of this Space Act Agreement with SpaceX is a huge step towards mitigating potential collisions.

Fairing recovery

Both of the fairing halves featured in Wednesday's mission are brand new, and with any luck, they will fly again soon. 

That is, if they land intact. Thanks to onboard parachutes and navigation software, the clamshell-like hardware will glide itself back to Earth and gently splash down in the Atlantic Ocean. From there, the two fairing pieces will be pulled from the water by SpaceX's newest boat, a bright pink and blue vessel named Shelia Bordelon.

This is the third mission now for Shelia Bordelon, which uses an onboard crane to retrieve the fairings. 

Follow Amy Thompson on Twitter @astrogingersnap. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.

A piece of debris from a SpaceX launch has turned up on someone's farm in central Washington, local authorities reported Friday (April 2) — about one week after the falling rocket debris sparked reports of "shooting stars" the U.S. Pacific Northwest. 

According to the Grant County Sheriff's Office, the recovered object appears to be a composite overwrapped pressure vessel, or COPV, belonging to the second stage of the Falcon 9 rocket that launched March 4 from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, on a mission dubbed Starlink 17.  

"SpaceX recovered a Composite-Overwrapped Pressure Vessel from last week’s Falcon 9 re-entry. It was found on private property in southwest Grant County this week," the Grant County Sheriff's Office wrote in a statement on Twitter, adding that they would not provide the exact location or the name of the man whose property it fell on. 

"Media and treasure hunters: we are not disclosing specifics. The property owner simply wants to be left alone," the sheriff's office said in the tweet. 

Related: Falling SpaceX debris puts on a light show in the sky

Although  Falcon 9 rocket successfully delivered 60 Starlink satellites to orbit last month, the rocket's second stage didn't deorbit properly after completing the mission. The second stage is the smaller, upper part of the Falcon 9 rocket that separates from the main booster to take satellites to their intended orbit. 

While the main booster returns to Earth for a landing (so SpaceX can refurbish and reuse it on future launches), once the second stage has completed its role in the mission, it is either intentionally destroyed or left to linger in orbit. Typically it conducts a "deorbit burn" that sends the craft on a safe trajectory to burn up in the atmosphere above the Pacific Ocean. 

But this time, something went wrong: According to Ars Technica, "there was not enough propellant after this launch to ignite the Merlin engine and complete the burn. So the propellant was vented into space, and the second stage was set to make a more uncontrolled re-entry into the atmosphere."

So, instead of burning up over the ocean, the rocket stage ended up breaking up in the sky over the Pacific Northwest — the fiery display visible not only from Washington but also from surrounding states and parts of Canada — just after 9 p.m. local time on Thursday, March 25, or midnight EDT (0400 GMT) on Friday, March 26.

The COPV discovered this week on the farm in southwestern Grant County is about 5 feet (1.5 meters) long, and it left an impact mark on the ground about 4 inches to 5 inches (10-13 centimeters) deep, NBC News reported. COPVs are used to store helium to pressurize the propellant tanks of the Falcon 9's upper stage. 

SpaceX did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Space.com will provide updates as this story develops.

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CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — SpaceX delivered its 13th batch of Starlink satellites to orbit Tuesday (Oct.6), following a two-week delay due to bad weather. 

The two-stage Falcon 9 rocket blasted off from Pad 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center at 7:29 a.m. EDT (1129 GMT), hauling a full stack of 60 Starlink satellites. Approximately 9 minutes later, the booster's first stage came back to Earth, landing on one of SpaceX's drone ships in the Atlantic Ocean. 

The launch marks SpaceX's 17th mission so far in 2020, and its 94th Falcon 9 flight to date. The company's fleet of flight-proven boosters has been busy this year, with the California-based rocket builder reaching a few new milestones, including launching and landing the same first-stage booster six times. 

The launch also came amid World Space Week 2020, which is celebrating the impact satellites have on everyday life. 

Related: SpaceX's Starlink satellite megaconstellation launches in photos

Poor weather conditions at Falcon 9's ocean recovery site forced SpaceX to stand down from its first attempt to launch this particular Starlink mission on Sept. 17. Weather concerns also thwarted a launch attempt on Sept. 28 and Oct. 5; while ground systems issues prevented the rocket from flying on another attempt on Oct. 1. But the fifth time was the charm today, with Mother Nature finally cooperating for a smooth launch. 

"A happy end to Scrub-tober," SpaceX integration and test engineer Siva Bharadvaj said during live commentary after the Starlink satellites were successfully deployed.

The weather was iffy this morning as a brief rain shower and patch of cumulus clouds rolled in, but the skies cleared as the minutes ticked away. Onlookers cheered as the Falcon leapt off the pad, signaling an end to the series of launch aborts and weather scrubs that have recently plagued the Space Coast. 

Related: Why SpaceX's Starlink satellites caught astronomers off guard

 A veteran booster 

The booster powering today's launch is a previously flown Falcon 9 first stage that the company has identified as B1058.3. This booster, now with three flights under its belt, previously carried two NASA astronauts to the International Space Station on May 30  as part of SpaceX's historic first crewed mission. The rocket then lofted a communications satellite for South Korea's military in July.  

Emblazoned with NASA's iconic worm logo, still visible underneath the booster's scorched appearance from its two trips to space and back, B1058 is one of the newest additions to SpaceX's fleet of frequent fliers. Approximately nine minutes after liftoff, the first stage made another landing, touching down on the deck of the SpaceX drone ship Of Course I Still Love You, which was waiting out in the Atlantic Ocean.

The massive drone ship is one of two used by SpaceX to catch its returning boosters. Of Course I Still Love You has been busy catching boosters this year, alternating duty with its counterpart, Just Read the Instructions. That ship was originally deployed in the Pacific Ocean, but switched coasts earlier this year, and has received a host of new upgrades. 

The landing today marked the 61st recovery of a Falcon first stage since SpaceX recovered its first booster in 2015. 

 Starlink expansion 

SpaceX's Starlink megaconstellation is designed to provide global broadband coverage for high-speed internet access, particularly for people in rural and remote areas. Each of the flat-panel Starlink satellites weighs roughly a quarter-ton and are built in-house at a SpaceX facility in Redmond, Washington. (The company also manufactures its own own user terminals and ground stations.)

While SpaceX expects its initial set of Starlink satellites to be 1,440 strong, the company has plans to launch thousands more. Company founder and CEO Elon Musk has said SpaceX needs between 500 and 800 satellites in orbit before service can begin to roll out. SpaceX is inching closer and closer to that goal, as it has delivered nearly 800 into orbit so far.

The Federal Communications Commission has granted SpaceX permission to launch as many as 12,000 of the flat-panel broadband satellites, but SpaceX may not stop there. The company has indicated it will see approval to launch as many as 30,000 of its internet-beaming satellites to beam down high-speed, low-latency Internet signals. 

SpaceX's Starlink system is currently going through a private beta-testing phase, with employees testing out the download speeds. That initial testing will extend to the public later this year. So far, data has shown that the system can support multiple high-definition streams at the same time, company officials have said. 

Users on the ground will connect to the burgeoning satellite service via a small terminal (roughly the size of a laptop) for users on the ground. Musk has said he wanted the terminals to be easy to use, and that they resemble a UFO on a stick. 

SpaceX has also started testing inter-satellite laser links that would allow data to flow through the network without having to route through ground stations — a feature the initial batch of Starlink satellites (launched in May 2019) did not have. The company has also SpaceX recently asked the Federal Communications Commission if it could add user terminals to its fleet of ships, in particular its two drone ships. 

"In order to expand its assessment of the end-to-end capabilities of its satellite system, SpaceX seeks authority to test these user terminals on seagoing platforms for a period of up to two years. Specifically, SpaceX proposes to deploy a total of ten earth stations across up to ten vessels, including two autonomous spaceport drone ships used to land rocket boosters at sea," the company wrote in the FCC filing posted Sept. 15.

The addition of these terminals will allow SpaceX to test its satellite network in the field as well as bolster recovery efforts by equipping its vessels with better communication tools. Remote and rural users as well as those on airliners and ships (such as cruise ships, etc.)  are its prime targets, so this would enable SpaceX to really test out its system.

Despite the promise of high-speed, low-latency broadband internet, SpaceX has taken some criticism for its Starlink satellites due to their potential to disrupt astronomical observations of the night sky. Shortly after the first batch's launch last year, astronomers expressed concern that the bright train of satellites marching across the sky will hinder their observations. SpaceX has tried to come up with solutions to help  mitigate this issue. 

To that end, this is the third batch of Starlink satellites now that are outfitted with a sunshade — a special visor — that the company hopes will reduce the satellite's apparent brightness by reducing the amount of sunlight reflected that’s reflected. 

 Reusable fairings 

SpaceX will attempt to recover the Falcon 9's payload fairing, or nose cone, on today's flight. In fact, one of the fairing halves has already supported two previous Starlink missions — one in May 2019 and one in March 2020.

Each piece of the clamshell-like hardware is outfitted with software that navigates it to the recovery zone, and a parachute system that lets them gently land, either in the ocean or the outstretched net of one of two recovery vessels.

GO Ms. Tree and GO Ms. Chief are both equipped with giant nets that allow them to act as a mobile catcher’s mitt. This massive piece of hardware accounts for 10% of Falcon 9's price tag so recovery efforts allow SpaceX to reduce launch costs and reuse more of its hardware. 

The duo is able to scoop the fairing pieces out of the ocean and haul them back to port or catch them as they fall back to Earth. All recovery efforts (either a catch or a scoop) typically occur approximately 40 minutes after liftoff. 

Simply having a giant net does not guarantee that one (or both of the boats) will actually be able to make a catch, however; for example, weather also plays a role. 

The 60 Starlink satellites are scheduled to separate from the rocket approximately 61 minutes after launch.

Up next for SpaceX is the launch of an upgraded GPS satellite for the U.S. Space Force. That launch is scheduled to blast off from Space Launch Complex 40 sometime in the near future. Teams are investigating an anomaly that occurred on Friday (Oct. 2), which caused an abort just before launch .

Follow Amy Thompson on Twitter @astrogingersnap. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.

SpaceX postponed the launch of a new fleet of Starlink internet satellites today (Sept. 28) due to bad weather at the mission's Florida launch site. 

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket was scheduled to launch 60 Starlink satellites from Pad 39A of NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 10:22 a.m. EDT (1422 GMT), but thick clouds over the launch site prevented the flight. 

"Unfortunately, it looks like due to weather violations, we're going to to have to scrub today," Alex Seigel, a senior material planner with SpaceX, said in live commentary. "But again, the most important thing is reducing as much risk on the mission as possible, and with that comes waiting for a window of good weather."

Related: SpaceX's Starlink satellite megaconstellation launches in photos 

The launch delay sets up a traffic jam of sorts in Cape Canaveral, where two more rockets are scheduled to lift off on Tuesday (Sept. 29). 

Up first is a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Delta IV Heavy rocket, which is set to launch the classified NROL-44 satellite for the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office at 12:02 a.m. EDT (0402 GMT) on Tuesday. That mission will lift off from Space Launch Complex 37 at the nearby Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. 

SpaceX is next with the launch of a GPS III navigation satellite for the U.S. military. That mission will launch from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station at 9:55 p.m. EDT (0155 Sept. 30 GMT). 

You can watch those launch live here and on the Space.com homepage, courtesy of ULA and SpaceX.

SpaceX's Starlink mission will likely have to wait until after the NROL-44 and GPS satellite launches before its next launch try. 

"We currently don't have a backup launch scheduled yet," Seigel said during SpaceX's launch webcast.

Monday's launch attempt was SpaceX's second try to launch the Starlink mission, the company's 13th internet satellite flight, this month. An attempt on Sept. 17 was scrubbed by bad weather not at the launch site, but at SpaceX's offshore drone ship landing platform where the Falcon 9's first stage will land. 

The Falcon 9 rocket on this mission is making its third flight for SpaceX as part of the company's reusability program to reduce spaceflight costs. The booster launched SpaceX's first astronaut flight for NASA in May, as well as a communications satellite for the South Korean military. 

SpaceX has launched more than 700 Starlink satellites into orbit to date as part of a megaconstellation project designed to offer global high-speed broadband internet coverage. The initial constellation is expected to include about 4,000 satellites, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has said.

Email Tariq Malik at tmalik@space.com or follow him @tariqjmalik. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Instagram.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — SpaceX will launch its next big batch of Starlink satellites into orbit for the company's growing megaconstellation today (Sept. 28), and you can watch the action live online. 

The Hawthorne, California-based company will loft 60 Starlink internet satellites on its workhorse Falcon 9 rocket from NASA's historic Pad 39A here at Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 10:22 a.m. EDT (1422 GMT). 

You can watch the launch live here and on the Space.com homepage, courtesy of SpaceX, beginning about 15 minutes before liftoff. You can also watch the launch directly via SpaceX. 

Related: SpaceX's Starlink satellite megaconstellation launches in photos 

Today’s flight, referred to as Starlink 12 by SpaceX, is actually the 13th big batch of satellites the company has shot into space. However, the company has been systematically de-orbiting its initial batch of 60 satellites that were launched in May 2019. That’s because SpaceX always meant for that initial bunch to be a test series. Thus far, 26 of the original satellites have been deorbited, eight are in decaying orbits, and 26 are operational. 

SpaceX hopes to provide high-speed internet access to users around the world through the Starlink megaconstellation. By using a small terminal (no larger than a laptop), users on the ground will be able to connect to the ever-growing network. SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk has said that the company needs to launch between 500 and 800 satellites in order to begin rolling out service. 

To date, SpaceX has launched more than 700 of the internet-beaming satellites into orbit, in an effort to fill out its planned initial constellation of 1,440 spacecraft. SpaceX has already begun speed-testing its space-based internet service, and the initial data looks promising. Company engineers have said that data collected so far indicates that the service will provide fast download speeds, allowing users to stream multiple HD movies at the same time.  

The Starlink broadband internet is in a private beta-testing phase now, but it will be available for the public to start beta-testing later this year, SpaceX representatives have said.

Related: SpaceX launches 60 Starlink satellites and lands rocket in dazzling nighttime liftoff

Today's launch marks the 94st flight overall for SpaceX’s workhorse two-stage Falcon 9 rocket. The liftoff is expected to feature a veteran Falcon 9 first stage, designated B1058, that has two flights under its belt. This frequent flyer previously launched two NASA astronauts on a trip to the space station as well as a communications satellite for the South Korean military. 

Flying previously flown boosters has become commonplace for SpaceX, as the company continues to prove the Falcon 9's reliability. SpaceX is both the launch provider as well as the customer for its Starlink missions, and as such has kept up a rapid launch pace this summer, relying heavily on its fleet of flight-proven boosters. 

In fact, this mission marks the 17th flight of 2020 for SpaceX, with Falcon 9 earning the title of most-flown American rocket earlier this year — a superlative it snagged from a chief competitor, United Launch Alliance's Atlas V. 

To date, SpaceX has successfully landed its first-stage boosters 60 times. Now that the company has two fully operational drone-ship landing platforms — "Of Course I Still Love You" and "Just Read the Instructions" — in Florida, it’s able to launch (and land) more rockets. The newer drone ship on the block, "Just Read the Instructions," is already at the recovery zone waiting for its turn to catch B1058 when it returns to Earth this afternoon. 

Related: Why SpaceX's Starlink satellites caught astronomers off guard

This is SpaceX's second attempt to get this mission off the ground. The previous attempt on Sept. 17, was called off due to poor weather conditions at the recovery zone. 

Activity in the Atlantic Ocean is very busy this year, with several storm systems developing. One such system, Hurricane Paulette, has been keeping the seas churned up so that the drone ship “Just Read the Instructions” could not stabilize itself enough to catch the returning booster. So SpaceX decided to stand down from its original launch attempt and wait for calmer seas. 

The delay worked in SpaceX's favor as it brought fairer weather and calmer seas. Forecasters at the 45th Weather Squadron predicted a 70% chance of favorable launch conditions today. The only issue was the possible development of cumulus clouds. 

SpaceX will continue its tradition of recovering the Falcon 9's payload fairing, or nose cone, on today's flight. The company has already deployed its twin net-equipped boats — called GO Ms. Tree and GO Ms. Chief — to snag the fairing halves as they fall back to Earth in two pieces.

Each piece of the clamshell-like hardware, which cost approximately $6 million combined, is outfitted with software that navigates it to the recovery zone, and a parachute system that lets them gently land in the ocean or the outstretched net of GO Ms. Tree and GO Ms. Chief.

One of the pieces of the fairing on this mission has flown twice already, protecting two different Starlink payloads — one in May 2019 and one in March 2020. 

Editor's note: This story, originally posted Sept. 17, has been updated for SpaceX's new launch date of Sept. 28. 

Follow Amy Thompson on Twitter @astrogingersnap. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.

SpaceX just plucked another payload fairing out of the sky, and you can see video of the dramatic cosmic catch.

The net-equipped SpaceX boat GO Ms. Tree snagged half of a falling payload fairing Tuesday (Aug. 18), shortly after a two-stage Falcon 9 rocket launched 58 Starlink internet satellites and three Earth-observation spacecraft into orbit. 

Payload fairings are the shrouds that protect satellites during launch. SpaceX fairings come in two pieces, both of which come back to Earth under parachutes in a guided fashion, thanks to small thrusters. Such tech aids recovery and reuse of the fairings, which cost about $6 million each, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk has said.

Related: SpaceX's Starlink satellite megaconstellation launches in photos 

GO Ms. Tree and its sister ship, GO Ms. Chief, are part of this picture as well. Seawater is extremely corrosive, so snatching fairing halves out of the sky makes refurbishment easier, Musk has said. The ships have snagged a handful of fairings to date, including a double catch during the launch of a South Korean military satellite last month. (Ocean splashdowns don't preclude reuse, however; SpaceX has reflown fairings that it fished out of the water.)

GO Ms. Chief pulled one fairing half out of the Atlantic Ocean Tuesday. But GO Ms. Tree caught the other one, a success captured by a camera-equipped drone. Musk posted that footage on Twitter Tuesday, scoring the 43-second video with some playfully incongruous lounge music.

This week's launch featured reusability action on multiple fronts. It was the sixth launch for this particular Falcon 9 first stage, for example, a milestone that SpaceX had never before achieved. And more liftoffs are likely coming for the booster, which aced its landing on a ship at sea Tuesday.

Starlink is SpaceX's burgeoning constellation of internet satellites. The company has launched nearly 600 Starlink craft to date, and many more will go up in the near future: SpaceX has permission to launch 12,000 such satellites and has applied for approval to loft up to 30,000 on top of that.

The three other satellites that went up Tuesday are SkySats. They belong to San Francisco-based company Planet, which operates the world's largest constellation of Earth-observing spacecraft. 

Mike Wall is the author of "Out There" (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook. 

SpaceX satellites are ruining skywatchers' views (and photographs) of NEOWISE, the brightest comet in the Northern Hemisphere since the 1995-96 show of Hale-Bopp. 

Visible just above the horizon right now, the comet appears faint and small to the naked eye, but can be seen clearly through cameras with long, telephoto lenses. Usually, when photographers capture objects like this in the night sky they use long exposure times, leaving the camera aperture open to collect light over the course of several seconds. But now comet-chasers report that a new fleet of SpaceX's Starlink satellites is leaving bright smears across their NEOWISE snaps, as the shiny orbiters streak through their frames during long exposures. 

 Related: 5 strange, cool things we've recently learned about the moon

This isn't the first time SpaceX has come under fire for these new sources of overhead light pollution. When the first satellites in the Starlink constellation, part of the company's plan to deliver internet access from orbit, launched in 2019, astronomers immediately raised concerns about their reflective properties. Telescopes, like consumer cameras, usually use long exposures in their scientific work. Starlink seems to be particularly reflective and to orbit at an elevation that can leave bright smears across telescope sensors and pollute data.

 "When we develop new, big facilities, big observatories, big surveys to go and do things like discover hazardous asteroids, we design them to within an inch of their lives. We do so to make sure that every [risk] is accounted for," Alex Parker, a Colorado-based astronomer, told Live Science in May 2019. "This is one of those confounding factors that, generally speaking, we haven't prepared for because it hasn't been an issue up 'til now."

Parker told Live Science that the Starlink fleet, which could eventually number in the thousands, seems to be particularly inclined to shine brightly at night. (Currently, 422 Starlink satellites are in orbit.)

NEOWISE's appearance in the dawn sky has created a rush of interest in astrophotography, and with it a new batch of skywatchers disappointed to see their view of the universe obscured by Starlink's satellites in low-Earth orbit. 

SpaceX, which has not returned a request for comment, has said it's taking steps to reduce Starlink's light pollution. But, as of this writing, the bright streaks remain an issue.

Originally published on Live Science.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — SpaceX will launch its tenth set of Starlink internet satellites into orbit today (July 8), and you can watch it live online.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will launch the Starlink mission from Pad 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Liftoff is scheduled for no earlier than 11:59 a.m. EDT (1559 GMT).  You can watch SpaceX's Starlink launch webcast here and on the Space.com homepage, courtesy of SpaceX, beginning about 15 minutes before liftoff. You'll also be able to watch the launch directly from SpaceX here. 

Related: SpaceX's Starlink satellite megaconstellation launches in photos

This flight is SpaceX's tenth dedicated Starlink launch and the eighth such mission of 2020. Originally slated to launch on June 26, the flight was postponed after company engineers determined they needed to do more pre-flight checkouts. 

On June 24, SpaceX fired up the rocket’s nine Merlin 1D engines as part of a routine static fire test. The test is designed to ensure that all the rocket’s systems are working properly prior to lift off.  

That test appeared to go as planned, and SpaceX announced it would attempt the launch on June 26. However, just over two hours before liftoff, the company opted to stand down and put the rocket through some more testing. 

To that end, SpaceX moved forward with the launch of an upgraded GPS satellite on June 30, and the mission went off without a hitch. The booster used in that mission recently returned to Port Canaveral on the deck of the company’s drone ship, Just Read the Instructions. That booster will be recycled to fly again another day.

Now SpaceX has set its sights on Starlink once again. The booster used in this flight is a veteran with four flights under its belt already. 

The rocket will attempt its fifth flight today, and just like the previous Starlink launch, the payload will contain other passengers. This flight will ferry two BlackSky satellites into orbit, as part of an ongoing rideshare agreement SpaceX has with Spaceflight, Inc. 

The California-based rocket builder recently tweeted that more than 100 spacecraft have been booked on upcoming flights as part of the rideshare program. One such customer with multiple bookings is Spaceflight Inc., who arranged the ride for BlackSky.

Tucked inside the rocket’s nose cone is a stack of 57 Starlink satellites along with two Earth-observing satellites for BlackSky, marking the second official rideshare mission under SpaceX's new rideshare program. (The company had flown rideshare missions before, but now has a dedicated service.)  

Related: SpaceX launches 60 Starlink satellites and lands rocket in dazzling nighttime liftoff

The star of today's mission is a previously flown booster, designated B1051 by SpaceX. It previously launched the Demo-1 mission in 2019, which sent an uncrewed Crew Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station, a trio of Earth-observing satellites for Canada, as well as two Starlink missions this year. 

SpaceX changed the rocket game by proving that they could be reused. Now, the company is staking its business on it as most of the rockets launched are veterans as opposed to new ones off the assembly line. In its rocket stable, SpaceX has five Falcon 9 first stage boosters as well as two Falcon Heavy side boosters. 

Unfortunately, the company lost two first stages in back-to-back drone ship misses but that hasn't phased SpaceX as it gears up for another month of multiple launches. The private spaceflight company kicked off its rapid launch cadence with the launch of two NASA astronauts — Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley — on May 30. 

The company followed that historic mission with three more launches in as many weeks. With the way the schedule is working out, we could see the same thing this month. On the docket is the launch of a South Korean communications satellite, an Argentinian communications satellite as well as another Starlink mission. 

To date, SpaceX's Falcon 9 has flown 88 missions — 10 of which have launched this year. The company’s busiest year for launches was back in 2018 when the company launched 21 times. With the rapid launch pace SpaceX has set for itself and the need to get its Starlink satellites in orbit, the company could come close to those numbers this year. 

To help increase the number of launches, SpaceX moved its former West Coast based drone ship, Just Read the Instructions to the East Coast to join its other ship, Of Course I Still Love You. 

Related: Why SpaceX's Starlink satellites caught astronomers off guard

Forecasters at the 45th Weather Squadron show that the weather for today’s launch is looking promising, with a 40% chance of weather violation. Launching from Florida in the afternoon in summer can be tricky, and today is no different. However, the launch could be early enough in the day to get off the ground before bad weather rolls in. The weather officers say that the formation of cumulus clouds as well as the potential for electricity in the atmosphere are the primary concerns. 

There’s a backup date of July 9, and the weather outlook increases slightly, with a 30% chance of violation. 

SpaceX has also deployed its two fairing-catching ships — GO Ms. Tree and GO Ms. Chief — in hopes of recovering the Falcon 9's payload fairings after they fall back to Earth. The fairing halves are outfitted with software that navigates them to the recovery zone, as well as a parachute system that lets them gently land in the ocean or the outstretched net of the company’s twin recovery vessels.  

Follow Amy Thompson on Twitter @astrogingersnap. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.

SpaceX will launch 60 new Starlink internet satellites into orbit on a used rocket today (April 22) and you can watch it all live online. 

A veteran Falcon 9 rocket is scheduled to launch SpaceX's Starlink 6 mission the historic Launch Pad 39A of NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 3:30 p.m. EDT (1930 GMT). The rocket's first-stage booster has flown three times before. 

You can watch the Starlink launch live here and on the Space.com homepage, courtesy of SpaceX. You can also watch the launch directly via SpaceX's webast page here. SpaceX webcasts usually begin about 15 minutes before liftoff.

Despite its name, Starlink 6 is actually the seventh batch of satellites to launch into space for SpaceX's growing broadband internet megaconstellation. The company launched its first Starlink flight in May 2019, with a second flight last November and four more since January of this year.

Currently, SpaceX has 360 satellites in orbit. The Starlink 6 mission will boost that number to 420. 

SpaceX's Starlink satellite network is a megaconstellation designed to provide fast and affordable internet access to people around the world, particularly in remote or under-served locations. The satellites connect to a ground box to link users to the internet. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk demonstrated the technology last year. 

SpaceX's initial plan is a constellation of 12,000 Starlink satellites, with the seeking permission to expand that fleet up to 30,000 satellites if needed. Last year, SpaceX Musk has said that at least 400 Starlink satellites would be needed to start basic service, with 800 satellites required for "moderate" coverage. 

With Starlink 6, SpaceX will surpass that 400-satellite target. SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell has said that Starlink service would likely begin in 2020. 

As is typical for SpaceX launches, Starlink 6 features several components making a return trip to space. The Falcon 9 first-stage booster has launched three missions, including SpaceX's Crew Dragon spacecraft test flight in March 2019, a three-satellite mission for Canada later that year and the fourth Starlink launch in early 2020.

The mission's payload, the two-piece nosecone that protects the Starlink satellites during launch, is also fully reused. One half of the fairing was captured by a SpaceX recovery boat equipped with a giant net, while the other was fished out of the sea from a previous flight. Reusing payload fairings can save at least $6 million per flight, SpaceX has said. 

Today's mission will mark SpaceX's third flight to feature recycled payload fairings and the fifth time a Falcon 9 booster has made a fourth flight.

Editor's note: This story has been updated to reflect a new 3:30 p.m. EDT launch time for SpaceX's Starlink satellites. 

• In Photos: SpaceX launches third batch of 60 Starlink satellites to orbit
• SpaceX's Starlink broadband service will begin in 2020: Report 
• Why SpaceX's Starlink satellites caught astronomers off guard

Email Tariq Malik at tmalik@space.com or follow him @tariqjmalik. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Instagram. 

SpaceX put 60 Starlink satellites in space May 23, the first little chunk of an eventual 12,000-satellite-strong "megaconstellation" that the private company plans to place in orbit. Not long after the launch, observers and astronomers noticed something: This train of five dozen objects looked really bright overhead — unusually bright for artificial satellites. And this light show has many astronomers worried.

"The Starlink satellites just passed directly overhead," Boulder, Colorado-based astronomer Alex Parker tweeted Saturday (May 25). "They were glinting, some as bright as Polaris. Quite an eerie looking thing. And yes, the stars are out."

Parker, an expert in orbital mechanics, caused a stir Saturday by posting the results of some modeling he'd done of the eventual Starlink constellation. Assuming the 12,000 satellites, intended to provide worldwide internet connectivity, were distributed randomly across a wide range of possible orbits, he found, hundreds of them might be visible in the night sky at any given moment as fast-moving, bright dots. [15 Amazing Images of Stars]

There are two problems with this scenario, Parker told Live Science in a Tuesday (May 28) interview.

The first is that none of the telescopes collecting data from the sky are prepared to deal with this many bright, artificial dots flitting across their fields of view.

"When we develop new, big facilities, big observatories, big surveys to go and do things like discover hazardous asteroids, we design them to within an inch of their lives. We do so to make sure that every [risk] is accounted for," he said. "This is one of those confounding factors that, generally speaking, we haven't prepared for because it hasn't been an issue up ‘til now."

And it could be a big issue, he said.

"If you're looking at things that are this bright moving through your field of view, potentially every image or every other image that you collect — depending on the size of your camera and where you're located on the Earth and the time of year — it's easy to intuit that this might be a problem," he said.

It's difficult to know yet just how significant a problem these satellites could be, he said, in large part because of all the unknowns about the eventual megaconstellation. Over what parts of the Earth will the satellites orbit? At what altitude? How will they be oriented? What are their exact dimensions and specifications? All those factors could have a big impact on how the Starlink megaconstellation looks from Earth, Parker said. SpaceX has not released any of that information.

"That's all the information we need in order to anticipate whether these [scientific surveys of the night sky], which are huge national endeavors, are going to succeed," he said.

The second problem with SpaceX cluttering the sky with bright, shiny satellites, Parker said, is that a private company is now in the position to transform i the experience of nighttime-viewing for every human on Earth. [Spaced Out! 101 Astronomy Images That Will Blow Your Mind]

"The sky is a shared cultural, natural resource. Literally, every human that has ever lived has lived under the same sky that we have above us now. And there's value in that. And it's really hard to quantify what the value of preserving the experience of the night sky is," Parker said.

Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, initially responded to Parker's calculations on Twitter with a post stating, "sats will be in darkness when stars are visible."

This isn't true, Parker explained to Live Science. When it's nighttime on Earth, he said, one might assume that the sun is directly behind the planet. But in most places, that assumption isn't true. Instead, especially for midlatitudes in summertime, there's a relatively small fraction of the planet between the ground and the sun. Get an object high enough, like a satellite, and it will catch sunlight coming over the nearest pole and reflect it down to the planet. It's unclear why the Starlink satellites seem to reflect so much more light than other satellites in orbit, Parker said, but it's not surprising that they catch the sunlight.

Musk later tweeted that Starlink will have "~0% impact on major advancements in astronomy," pointing out that there are already 4,900 satellites in orbit that people mostly don't notice from the ground. He also said that "we need to move telescopes to orbit anyway."

"If we need to tweak sat orientation to minimize solar reflection during critical astronomical experiments, that’s easily done," Musk added.

Later, he also tweeted that "potentially helping billions of economically disadvantaged people [via internet access through the constellation] is the greater good," and that he had "sent a note to Starlink team last week specifically regarding albedo reduction."

Live Science reached out to SpaceX with questions about the details of the eventual megaconstellation and other relevant issues. A SpaceX representative replied by email with links to Musk's tweets and this two-page fact sheet with details about the first Starlink launch, but no details on the satellites' specifications or whether SpaceX believed it had a responsibility to preserve the night sky.

Parker said the astronomy community still doesn't have enough information to feel confident.

"We're really operating in an information vacuum at the moment," he said. "All we know is that when these launched, they were very bright. "

He noted a sense of powerlessness among his colleagues.

"We don't know what process we can take to raise these concerns," Parker said. "There's nobody we can lobby to make a new requirement… that launches consider the visual impact of satellites. It's not a conversation that's ever had to happen before. And that's where I think part of where you see people getting concerned, is waking up to this issue and the possibility that there's nothing they can do about it."

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Originally published on Live Science.