Reading: Elon Musk’s satellites are falling out of the sky

Elon Musk’s satellites are falling out of the sky

Last updated: 2025/10/09 at 1:22 PM

News Room Published 9 October 2025

Starlinks are falling out of the sky one at a time, experts say. There’s already a large volume of space junk circling above our planet and Smithsonian astrophysicist Dr Jonathan McDowell told Earthsky the Starlink problem could get worse. The issue also highlights the problem surrounding the planet’s expendable satellites in Low Earth Orbit (Picture: Getty)

There was an idea that Musk’s Starlink satellites were to be revolutionary as they were designed to provide fast, low-latency broadband internet to remote areas using a constellation of thousands of small satellites in Low Earth Orbit. This was with the aim to provide global connectivity, and SpaceX – another company owned by Musk – has been launching thousands of Starlinks up there using his reusable rockets since 2019, with more than 8,000 currently in operation (Picture: Getty)

In 2025, SpaceX launched more than 2,000 satellites alone but it is not the only company sending satellites up there. Amazon kickstarted its plan to deploy more than 3,200 with its first batch launched earlier this year. Dr McDowell told EarthSky: ‘With all constellations deployed, we expect about 30,000 low-Earth orbit satellites (Starlink, Amazon Kuiper, others) and perhaps another 20,000 satellites at 1,000 km [620 miles] from the Chinese systems’ (Picture: Getty)

This is an issue as Low Earth Orbit’s is getting more crowded, resulting in a lot more satellite casualties. One of the reasons why this would be happening is because Starlink’s satellites have a short lifespan of around five years. After this, they’re guided towards the Earth, where they’re supposed to burn up upon re-entering the atmosphere, but this is causing a lot of pollution – as well as another issue (Picture: Getty)

A 2023 report by the Federal Aviation Administration warned that by 2035, some 28,000 fragments from Starlink satellites could survive re-entry each year, and this means that the chance of someone on the ground getting struck by debris would rise each year. As Earth is 70% water, a lot of Starlink reentries are not being witnessed and many people will not know the full extent of the dropping satellites (Picture: Getty)

Right now, Dr McDowell warns that Earth’s on track to be bombarded by five satellite re-entries per day in the near future, but that is not the worst case scenario. We could be seeing something known as Kessler syndrome, where a few collisions between satellites become out of control and create even more space debris, potentially trapping humankind below a whirling vortex of orbital shrapnel (Picture: Getty)

Dr McDowell explained: ‘For the low-orbit satellites we expect a five-year replacement cycle, and that translates to 5 reentries a day. It’s not clear if the Chinese will orbit-lower theirs or just accelerate us to chain-reaction Kessler syndrome.’ But since SpaceX’s satellites are low enough that they would not likely survive the amount of time needed for this cascade to happen, it would force competitors to take their crafts to higher orbits which means they would take decades, if not centuries, to de-orbit (Picture: Getty)

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