Jan 1 (Reuters) – Starlink will begin a reconfiguration of its satellite constellation by lowering all of its satellites orbiting \u200bat around 550 km (342 miles) to 480 km over \u200cthe course of 2026, Michael Nicolls, SpaceX’s vice president of Starlink engineering, said \u200con Thursday.<\/p>\n
The company is looking to increase space safety by lowering the satellites’ orbit.<\/p>\n
This comes after Starlink said in December that one of its satellites experienced an anomaly in space, creating a “small” amount of \u2060debris and cutting off \u200ccommunications with the spacecraft at 418 km in altitude, a rare kinetic accident in orbit for the \u200dsatellite internet giant.<\/p>\n
The company had said the satellite, one of nearly 10,000 in space for its broadband internet network, quickly fell four kilometers \u200bin altitude, suggesting some kind of explosion occurred on board.<\/p>\n
“Lowering \u200cthe satellites results in condensing Starlink orbits, and will increase space safety in several ways,” Nicolls said in a post on social media platform X, adding “the number of debris objects and planned satellite constellations is significantly lower below 500 km, reducing the aggregate \u2060likelihood of collision.”<\/p>\n
The number of spacecraft \u200bin Earth’s orbit has jumped sharply in \u200brecent years as companies and countries race to deploy tens of thousands of satellites for internet constellations \u200dand other space-based \u2060services such as communications and Earth imagery.<\/p>\n
SpaceX, long known for its rocket launch business, has become the world’s largest satellite \u2060operator through Starlink, a network of nearly 10,000 satellites beaming broadband internet to \u200cconsumers, governments and enterprise customers.<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Rishabh Jaiswal in \u200cBengaluru; Editing by Chris Reese)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jan 1 (Reuters) – Starlink will begin a reconfiguration of its satellite constellation by lowering all of its…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":382547,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[186517,54495,163591,6712,79,193,102316,5408],"class_list":{"0":"post-382546","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-michael-nicolls","9":"tag-orbiting","10":"tag-satellite-constellation","11":"tag-satellite-internet","12":"tag-science","13":"tag-space","14":"tag-space-safety","15":"tag-starlink"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/382546","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=382546"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/382546\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/382547"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=382546"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=382546"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=382546"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}