SpaceX says that dozens of the 49 Starlink satellites aboard its most recent Starlink launch may have been doomed by a “geomagnetic storm” that arrived the day after.

Earlier SpaceX launched a new batch of 49 Starlink satellites to Low Earth Orbit (LEO) but it lost 40 of them to a geomagnetic storm that hit Earth last week. The satellites were launched on a Falcon-9 rocket on February 3 and the geomagnetic storm hit Earth the next day.

According to estimates, each satellite costs SpaceX $250,000 to build and launch, meaning the storm could cost it as much as $10million. 

The geomagnetic storm was the result of a coronal mass ejection from the Sun by an M1-class solar flare that lasted for about four hours, pushing materials into the vacuum of space and towards inner planets including Earth.

"Preliminary analysis shows the increased drag at low altitudes prevented the satellites from leaving safe-mode," SpaceX said in a statement.

The company said that since the satellites did not come out of the safe mode to begin orbit raising manoeuvres, up to 40 of the satellites "will re-enter or already have re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere" and disintegrated.

"The deorbiting satellites pose zero collision risk with other satellites and, by design demise upon atmospheric re-entry—meaning no orbital debris is created and no satellite parts hit the ground," SpaceX said.

SpaceX announced Starlink – its project to beam internet coverage to anywhere on the planet using a constellation of satellites – in 2015, and launched its first batch four years later.

The company intends to put 12,000 satellites into Earth's orbit, possibly rising to 42,000 in future. Currently, it has almost 2,000 in orbit.

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