Musk’s Starlink Says It Lost Communication With One of Its Satellites

The company says it will coordinate with NASA and SpaceX, its owner, to track objects orbiting around the Earth.

Elon Musk’s satellite and internet provider Starlink announced Thursday that it lost contact with one of its satellites and will work with NASA to monitor the objects it released.

“Starlink experienced an anomaly on satellite 35956, resulting in loss of communications with the vehicle” on Dec. 17 at around 418 kilometers, or 259 miles, above the surface of the Earth, said Starlink, a subsidiary of Musk’s SpaceX, in a post on X.

The “anomaly led to venting of the propulsion tank, a rapid decay in semi-major axis by about 4 km [2.4 miles], and the release of a small number of trackable low relative velocity objects,” the company added.

The company said Musk’s SpaceX will coordinate with NASA and the U.S. Space Force to monitor objects released by the satellite, noting that it is “largely intact, tumbling, and will reenter the Earth’s atmosphere” in the coming weeks. It did not provide a specific timeframe.

The out-of-control satellite is located below the International Space Station (ISS) and is not expected to collide with it or cause risk to the ISS or its crew, according to Starlink.

“As the world’s largest satellite constellation operator, we are deeply committed to space safety. We take these events seriously,” the post said.

“Our engineers are rapidly working to root cause and mitigate the source of the anomaly and are already in the process of deploying software to our vehicles that increases protections against this type of event.”

Starlink has more than 8 million users across more than 150 countries, it said last month.

That’s up from 4 million reported in September 2024, according to a post from the company issued at the time.

Notably, Starlink has been used by Ukrainian forces in the Russia–Ukraine war since early 2022 to replace internet and communication networks that were destroyed during the conflict. In 2023, Starlink won a Department of Defense contract to provide satellite services in Ukraine.

Starlink has been used by Ukrainian troops for a variety of efforts, including battlefield communications.

Space debris, or space junk, consists of discarded launch vehicles or parts of a spacecraft that float hundreds of miles above Earth, risking collisions with satellites or the ISS.

Debris can also be caused by an explosion in space or when countries conduct missile tests to destroy their own satellites with missiles. China, the United States, Russia, and India have all shot down satellites, creating space debris.

By Jack Phillips

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