SpaceX satellite explodes in geomagnetic storm in spectacular video footage

SpaceX lost 40 out of 49 satellites in a recent launch, leading them to disintegrate in the Earth’s atmosphere

The sight of SpaceXsatellites burning up in the Earth’s atmosphere has been captured on video over Puerto Rico.

Elon Musk’s private space company recently lost as many as 40 satellites this week, due to a powerful geomagnetic storm that interfered with their launch.

A coronal mass ejection from the Sun – a huge pulse of energy – caused up to 50 per cent higher drag than on previous launches. “These storms cause the atmosphere to warm and atmospheric density at our low deployment altitudes to increase” SpaceX said yesterday.

The Starlink team put the satellites into a safe mode where they would fly edge-on relative to the drag to prevent damage, but many had already succumbed to an inevitable self-destruction.

Video footage from the astronomy group Sociedad de Astronomía del Caribe shows the satellite breaking down.

“There is very little doubt that this was a Starlink satellite reentering”, Marco Langbroek, a satellite tracker at Leiden University, wrote in a blog post. This is because the orbital plane of the launch would have been over the country at the time of the event.

While there was some suggestion that it could be a Falcon 9 rocket stage from 2017, that piece of space debris had already reentered the previous day - and was much lower than the Star.link satellites would have been.

The number of SpaceX satellites in the Earth’s orbit is a growing concern. Nasa recently warned the Federal Communications Commission that “the potential for a significant increase in the frequency of conjunction events and possible impacts to Nasa’s science and human spaceflight missions" could be a result of increased megaconstellations.

There are currently 25,000 total objects in orbit around the Earth, with over 6,000 of them below 600 kilometres. ‘Low-Earth orbit’, a height at which satellite networks such as Starlink would operate in, is defined as an altitude of 2,000 kilometres or less.

SpaceX’s expansion of Starlink would “more than double the number of tracked objects in orbit and increase the number of objects below 600 km over five-fold," Nasa also said.

The knock-on effect of a collision could result in enough space debris around the planet that human beings are unable to travel off it.