Starlink will begin lowering the orbit of its satellites from around 550 kilometers to roughly 480 kilometers throughout 2026, SpaceX’s vice president of Starlink engineering, Michael Nicolls, said on Thursday.
The reconfiguration aims to improve space safety by reducing the risk of collisions in increasingly crowded orbital zones. According to SpaceX, fewer debris objects and planned satellite constellations operate below 500 kilometers, lowering the overall likelihood of accidents.
The decision follows a rare in-orbit anomaly reported in December, when a Starlink satellite experienced a failure that generated a small amount of debris and lost communications. SpaceX said the satellite rapidly dropped in altitude, suggesting an onboard explosion.
With nearly 10,000 satellites already deployed, Starlink is the world’s largest satellite operator, as competition accelerates to deploy massive constellations for broadband, communications and Earth observation services.
Michael Nicolls on X:
Starlink is beginning a significant reconfiguration of its satellite constellation focused on increasing space safety. We are lowering all @Starlink satellites orbiting at ~550 km to ~480 km (~4400 satellites) over the course of 2026. The shell lowering is being tightly coordinated with other operators, regulators, and USSPACECOM.
Lowering the satellites results in condensing Starlink orbits, and will increase space safety in several ways. As solar mininum 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. Correspondingly, the number of debris objects and planned satellite constellations is significantly lower below 500 km, reducing the aggregate likelihood of collision.
Starlink satellites have extremely high reliability, with only 2 dead satellites in its fleet of over 9000 operational satellites. Nevertheless, if a satellite does fail on orbit, we want it to deorbit as quickly as possible. These actions will further improve the safety of the constellation, particularly with difficult to control risks such as uncoordinated maneuvers and launches by other satellite operators.
Starlink // Shutterstock