Elon Musk's SpaceX loses 40 Starlink satellites in one day

pcgamer.com:

It has not been a good week for SpaceX, Elon Musk's aerospace technology company. On February 3, the company successfully launched 49 Starlink internet satellites into orbit, but up to 40 of them will be lost because of a geomagnetic storm that occurred just one day later.

Satellite internet service is nothing new, but it suffers from significant flaws including limited speeds, high latency, and in many areas, prohibitive costs. Starlink, publicly announced in 2015, aims to offer significantly better performance—not quite as good as cable and fiber, but close enough to be competitive. Not everyone is a fan—some astronomers, for instance, worry about the impact of a multitude of bright satellites in the sky on their work—but in terms of bringing effective broadband to all corners of the globe, the system at the very least shows great potential.

Unfortunately, as detailed by space.com, the most recent satellite deployment was a major bust. The launch went off without a hitch, but the geomagnetic storm—a major disturbance of Earth's magnetosphere caused by sustained periods of high solar winds—on February 4 wreaked havoc on them. SpaceX explained in an update that the storm caused dramatically increased atmospheric drag on the satellites, threatening their orbit and leading the Starlink team to put them into a «safe mode» in which they would fly edge-on through the storm, like the wing of a plane. But once the satellites were put into safe mode, they could not be brought back to normal operation.

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