Musk's Starlink satellites disrupted by major solar storm

[May 11, 2024]  By Utkarsh Shetti
 
(Reuters) -Starlink, the satellite arm of Elon Musk's SpaceX, warned on Saturday of a "degraded service" as the Earth is battered by the biggest geomagnetic storm due to solar activity in two decades.   

An evening launch of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying 22 Starlink satellites to low-Earth orbit from Space Launch Complex 4 East (SLC-4E) at Vandenberg Space Force Base is seen over the Pacific Ocean from Encinitas, California, U.S., April 1, 2024. REUTERS/Mike Blake/File Photo

Starlink owns around 60% of the roughly 7,500 satellites orbiting Earth and is a dominant player in satellite internet.

Musk said earlier in a post on X that Starlink satellites were under a lot of pressure due to the geomagnetic storm, but were holding up so far.

The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has said the storm is the biggest since October 2003 and likely to persist over the weekend, posing risks to navigation systems, power grids, and satellite navigation, among other services.

The thousands of Starlink satellites in low-Earth orbit use inter-satellite laser links to pass data between one another in space at the speed of light, allowing the network to offer internet coverage around the world.

(Reporting by Utkarsh Shetti in Bengaluru; Editing by Alison Williams and Mark Potter)

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