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SpaceX has revealed to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) that it deorbited 472 Starlink ultrafast broadband satellites – burning them up in Earth’s atmosphere – during the six-month period from December 2024 to May 2025 (2.6 per day), which marked a significant increase from previous period of six-months when just 73 met a fiery demise.
At present Starlink has around 7,900 satellites in Low Earth Orbit (c.4,300 are v2 Mini / GEN 2A) – mostly at altitudes of c.500-600km – and they’ll add thousands more by the end of 2027. Residential customers in the UK usually pay from £75 a month, plus £299 for hardware (currently free for most areas) on the ‘Standard’ unlimited data plan (kit price may vary due to different offers), which promises UK latency times of 28-36ms, downloads of 103-258Mbps and uploads of 15-26Mbps. Cheaper and more restrictive options also exist for roaming users.
However, smaller LEO satellites, such as those from operators like Starlink, OneWeb (Eutelsat), Amazon (Kuiper) and others, are designed to have a relatively short lifespan (e.g. Starlinks are designed to last for 5 years) – like absurdly expensive consumables. After that they will be directed back down by operators to burn up (incinerate) in our atmosphere or – if they fail (no operator control) – they’ll be pulled down by gravity and atmospheric drag in the space of a few short years.
Suffice to say that, given the rise in launch rates over recent years, it is inevitable that Starlink will suffer a notable rise in retirements as the years roll by (particularly of their GEN1 / first generation spacecraft). But independent evidence from earlier this year had already indicated that SpaceX was deorbiting more Starlinks than expected (here) and the latest official data (credits to PC Mag) confirms that trend.
For example, most of the deorbited Starlinks (430) were indeed GEN1, but they were also less than 5 years old and the rest belonged to the second-generation (GEN2) network. Suffice to say that it’s not clear quite why so many Starlinks have been de-orbited at this time, although a small portion will have done so due to failure and some would have been reaching the end of their life. But the others remain a mystery.
Most such satellites burn up without incident in the atmosphere, although there have been exceptionally rare cases where chunks of metal did survive all the way back down to the surface (GEN2/3 satellites are now designed to be better at disintegration during atmospheric re-entry). Some scientists also remain concerned about the release of potentially harmful chemicals into the atmosphere, which they fear might damage the sensitive ozone layer etc.