Just over a month into 2022, Musk's private space company SpaceX has entered a high-frequency launch state, and has successfully sent 254 satellites into space with 6 "Falcon" 9 reusable rockets, including 3 batches of 147 "Starlink" satellites, while all the first-stage rockets and fairings have been successfully recovered. Today, Space X issued an official statement saying that 40 "Starlink" satellites suddenly re-entered the atmosphere, that is, crashed.
Musk lost 40 Starlink satellites at once
Based on the current news, the 40 "Starlink" satellites that re-enter the atmosphere are the ones that were recently launched on February 3, 2022. At that time, SpaceX sent 49 StarChain satellites into space from the Kennedy Space Center LC-39A launch pad in Cape Canaveral with a five-hand B1061 Falcon 9BLOCK5 rocket that had performed two manned missions. At this point, the number of "star chains" in orbit has reached 1952, and one more launch can break through the 2000 mark.
Hit one more, and the number of StarChains in orbit will exceed 2,000
However, just when the 49 "StarChain" satellites stayed in the test orbit at an altitude of 210 kilometers, confirmed that the status was OK, ready to start the electric thrust, and upgraded to the final deployment orbit, an unexpected geomagnetic storm led to a surge in the density of the atmosphere in low Earth orbit, and the flight resistance of the "Starchain" small satellites increased by 50%, and they could only retract the small "wings" and directly re-enter the atmosphere, and only 9 satellites survived.
Starlink satellites look like blade batteries
The so-called geomagnetic storm, also known as solar storm, refers to the temporary interference with the earth's magnetosphere caused by the magnetic field cloud of the solar wind shock wave interacting with the earth's magnetic field, and the shock wave of about 1263 kilometers per second will not only compress the earth's magnetosphere, increase radiation, endanger the safety of astronauts and spacecraft, but also intensify atmospheric activity and increase atmospheric resistance.
Schematic of the interaction of solar wind particles with the Earth's magnetic field
The low-Earth orbit of 200 to 500 kilometers, although it is space, still has a certain atmospheric resistance, and the spacecraft needs to be constantly ignited and kept rotating around the earth at high speed in order not to fall. For example, on October 31, 2021, a strong X1 solar flare in sunspot zone 12887 made everyone worry about the two space stations in low Earth orbit for a while. In the 1970s, a solar storm caused increased atmospheric activity, increasing the flight resistance of the Salyut space station, which belonged to the Soviet Union at the time, and thus derailed it from its original orbit.
The aurora borealis from this event is also beautiful
The geomagnetic storm increased the air resistance in low-Earth orbit at an altitude of more than 200 kilometers by 50%, which is very fatal. The current new "Starchain" satellite, although installed with Hall thrusters, but the input power range is only 1.35 kilowatts to 10 kilowatts, thrust of 40 to 600 milliniu, can not be compared with the Hall thrusters on the continental space station, so it can not cope with the sudden increase of 50% air resistance, can only put away the solar wing into safe mode, hoping to reduce the resistance of hard carrying, but in the end it was not carried over, the remaining 9 surviving satellites, the final outcome is not optimistic.
That's right, the Starlink satellites have Hall thrusters
That is to say, the "Falcon" 9 rocket on February 3 is equivalent to a white fight, Musk lost tens of millions of dollars at once, which requires how many first-stage boosters and fairings to be recovered to save ah. Musk has recently been worried about the continuous postponement of the first orbital class launch of the "Starship", and has suffered this sudden blow, which is estimated to be "crying".
Fortunately, these "starlink" satellites are not large, and at the beginning of the design, zero-risk materials and designs were used, so they can burn up in the atmosphere and turn into a meteor shower without causing damage to the ground. And because "StarLink" has achieved mass production, the unit price of satellites is not high, and the overall loss can still be carried. It's just that the "small target" that originally only needed to hit one more to reach 2,000 satellites in orbit has now become the need to hit 2 more, which is the biggest loss for Musk and SpaceX, who need to constantly toss out big moves and attract the attention of the outside world.