Why Elon Musk's satellites are 'dropping like flies'

Fierce solar activity destroying Starlink satellites

Photo collage of Elon Musk looking up. Tiny Starlink satellites are falling around him. One has bounced off his face.
Starlink satellites make Musk the most dominant individual in the 'orbital realm'
(Image credit: Illustration by Julia Wytrazek / Getty Images)

Elon Musk has no shortage of targets for his animosity: the media, "woke" progressives, the trans "agenda" and, most recently, his former best buddy Donald Trump. But one less expected Musk adversary is more powerful than them all: the Sun.

SpaceX's vast network of Starlink internet service satellites are "dropping like flies", due to an extraterrestrial weather phenomenon caused by the Sun, said Futurism. And it's only set to get worse.

'Particularly prone' to early burn-up

The thousands of Starlink satellites orbiting our planet have given space scientists a "golden opportunity to study the effects" of the Sun's activity on the lifespan of these "minimalist, constellation-based spacecraft", said Futurism. And it appears that Musk's "space internet constellation" is "particularly prone to the effect of geomagnetic storms", triggered by eruptions from the Sun, said The Independent. These "ferocious solar storms", Nasa scientists have found, are causing many of Musk's low-orbit satellites to fall to Earth "faster than expected".

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The impact is particularly significant at the moment because the Sun is approaching the peak of an 11-year activity cycle, "known as the solar maximum", which provokes "large amounts of extreme space weather".

The earlier than predicted satellite "re-entries" could "increase the chances of them not burning up properly in the Earth's atmosphere". and debris reaching the Earth. However, so far, the "only known instance" of this happening was in August 2024, when a piece of a Starlink satellite was discovered on a farm in Canada.

'Only so much can be done'

The solar storm problem threatens one of Musk's biggest power grabs to date. When his engineers "bundled a batch of prototype satellites into a rocket's nose cone six years ago, there were fewer than 2,000 functional satellites in Earth's orbit". Now more than 7,000 of his satellites now surround Earth, "like a cloud of gnats", said The Atlantic.

This is the most dominant any individual has been in the "orbital realm" since the late 1950s, when Sergei Pavlovich Korolev, the Soviet engineer who developed Sputnik and its launch vehicle, was "the only guy in town" as far as satellites were concerned, space historian Jonathan McDowell told the magazine.

But the Sun is an adversary not even Musk can overcome. Solar storm forecasting "has significantly improved over the past few years", Piyush Mehta, a US professor of aerospace engineering, wrote on The Conversation in 2022 but "there is only so much shielding that can be done in the face of a powerful geomagnetic storm". The Sun is "essential for life to go on," he said, but, like a child who often throws tantrums, "its ever-changing disposition make things challenging".

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Chas Newkey-Burden has been part of The Week Digital team for more than a decade and a journalist for 25 years, starting out on the irreverent football weekly 90 Minutes, before moving to lifestyle magazines Loaded and Attitude. He was a columnist for The Big Issue and landed a world exclusive with David Beckham that became the weekly magazine’s bestselling issue. He now writes regularly for The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Independent, Metro, FourFourTwo and the i new site. He is also the author of a number of non-fiction books.