SpaceX’s Vice President of Starlink engineering Michael Nicolls said on Thursday that the company will begin a reconfiguration of its satellite constellation by lowering all of its satellites orbiting at around 550 kilometers (342 miles) to 480 km over the course of 2026. This comes after Starlink said in December that one of its satellites experienced an “anomaly” in space creating a “small” amount of debris and cutting off communications with the spacecraft at 418 km in altitude.
Starlink said the satellite, one of nearly 10,000 in space for its broadband internet network, quickly fell four kilometers in altitude, suggesting some kind of explosion occurred on board.
“Lowering the satellites results in condensing Starlink orbits, and will increase space safety in several ways,” Nicolls said in a post on social media platform X, adding “the number of debris objects and planned satellite constellations is significantly lower below 500 km, reducing the aggregate likelihood of collision.”
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Nicolls pointed to the coming solar minimum — a period in the sun’s 11ish-year cycle when activity is lower — as one of the reasons for the move. The next solar minimum is expected to occur in the early 2030s. “As solar minimum approaches, atmospheric density decreases which means the ballistic decay time at any given altitude increases – lowering will mean a >80% reduction in ballistic decay time in solar minimum, or 4+ years reduced to a few months,” Nicolls wrote.
A few days ago, Nicolls mentioned a close call with a batch of satellites he said were launched from China seemingly without any attempt to coordinate with operators of existing satellites in space.
Of late, companies and countries have been racing to deploy tens of thousands of satellites, internet constellations and other space-based service, sharply increasing the number of satellites in Earth’s orbit.
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Starlink is a network of nearly 10,000 satellites owned by SpaceX. These satellites beam broadband internet to consumers, governments and enterprise customers.
A few months ago, space trackers discovered that Starlink’s satellites are falling to Earth at a concerning rate. Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in the U.S., recorded an average of between one to two Starlink satellites deorbiting each day in 2025. This figure is expected to rise to five per day as the company plans to grow its space internet constellation.
Videos of the satellites falling to the ground have surfaced on social media, leading to concerns that they could pose risks to people on the ground. However, these satellites are not considered dangerous, as they have been designed to burn up entirely in the Earth’s atmosphere before reaching the ground.