By Mack Reed
Every satellite – and the service it provides – faces the constant and fast-increasing risk of getting knocked out of service in a collision with other satellites and chunks of orbital debris.
The number of spacecraft, rocket bodies, and debris objects circling earth (estimated at nearly 50,000) has been increasing by an average of 30% per year.
The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Office of Space Commerce is hurrying development of TRACSS to deliver conjunction warnings and other “basic” SDA services to civilian spacecraft operators.
But these services can’t address the compounding risks of solar flares – commonly known as “space weather” – which have the potential to deliver an even more powerful blow to thousands of satellites that increasingly prop up life on Earth.
Space weather impacts the performance of GPS, communication, defense, and edge-compute satellite operations, complicating the already-risky orbital environment.
This summer, Earth is entering the peak period of a typical 11-year solar-activity cycle; Solar activity in the form of coronal-mass ejections (CMEs) is sending particle radiation, X-rays and UV radiation towards Earth. On Tuesday, the strongest storm of 2025 – a Class X2.7 flare – hit the earth, knocking out radio signals in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.
These effects can overwhelm any ability to respond to them adequately because they are felt in Earth’s orbit so quickly – sometimes within tens of minutes after the sun hurled plasma and radiation into space 93 million miles away.
Solar flares disrupts satellite activity in three distinct ways:
- SRB (solar radio bursts) are close enough to satellite frequencies that they can interfere with satellite communications and GPS signals
- Radiation surges and geomagnetic disruptions from particles flung earthward by CMEs can damage satellite electronics permanently.
- Strong solar activity heats the upper atmosphere, increasing drag on satellites in lower earth orbit (LEO) and making them susceptible to premature deorbit – basically they slow down and fall out of the sky.
The net effects of and risks from solar weather cross many planes of human experience:
- GPS inaccuracy: GPS-guided farm equipment can veer off course. GPS disruption throws off pinpoint targeting by several meters for anything from driving directions to weapons deployment.
- Damage to electrical grids: Though most utility companies are ready for it, and rely on forecasts from NOAA and others to prepare for such events, they can be knocked offline.
- De-orbit or destabilization: Satellites that we all rely on for communications, edge compute, GPS and other services fall out of orbit due to increased drag or fail to show their true position to operators on earth.
How serious is the drag/de-orbit phenomenon? A surge of space weather last spring threw the problem into sharp relief:
- In February, 2024, Starlink deployed 49 satellites – and lost 38 of them to drag-induced de-orbiting.
- In May, 2024, the quintuple solar-flare “Gannon storm” – the largest geomagnetic storm in more than 20 years – caused the “mass migration” of 5,000 satellites (many of them belonging to SpaceX). They moved suddenly – some automatically, some by command – to higher, safer orbits to escape increased drag, forcing them to pass through other orbits and magnifying risk of collision with debris and other spacecraft.
- The same storm caused SpaceX to suffer position-estimation errors of up to 20 kilometers for their Starlink satellites.
- As the MIT researcher who reported the effects of those events said at the time: “If we’re uncertain in where our spacecraft are by 20 kilometers, then you can throw collision avoidance out the window.”
In all, Kansas State University economics researchers made a “conservative estimate” that the Gannon storm caused $500m in losses to the corn-farming industry alone. So far, there is no estimate of the cost of the ensuing orbits, orbit migrations, and position errors.
How does the risk posed by space weather dovetail with space-domain awareness and national security? Here’s a good summation:
“To prevent collisions in low-Earth orbit, satellite constellation operators have adopted automated collision-avoidance systems.
Unfortunately, the automated systems only work if operators can predict where satellites will be in 12 to 24 hours. But space weather models aren’t that precise.
Forecasts of the arrival time of coronal mass ejections, which increase drag in low Earth orbit, tend to be accurate within 10 hours. As a result, individual satellites can be dozens of kilometers from where operators thought they would be a day earlier.” (Space News 2/12/25)
This vulnerability is not going unstudied, but the critical examination needed is still in its infancy; beyond space weather forecasting and shielding electronic components, there is no industrial solution for mitigating the effects of solar flares on the fly.
U.S. and European weather and space agencies have worked to improve orbital space weather resilience for several decades – but mostly with a preparedness-and-mitigation approach.
NOAA and the European Space Agency maintain weather-monitoring spacecraft at the LaGrange points – positions between Earth and sun where the gravitational forces of both bodies nullify each other – allowing the craft to stay in place and constantly monitor solar winds.
In May, 2024, a Space Weather Tabletop Exercise (TTX) conducted by NOAA, NASA, NSF, FEMA, DHS, and Johns Hopkins University – the first of its kind – resulted in better planning and coordination among the agencies. The team’s Final Report concluded, “There is a critical need to develop more robust forecasting capabilities of space weather drivers and effects.”
AI and machine learning can be part of that leap forward, empowering a more proactive approach to space weather preparedness and response.
Built right, by blending space weather into the realm of space domain awareness and daily satellite operations, such technology can de-risk the sun’s short- and long-term effects on earthside services these vital spacecraft sustain.
Watch this space.
Mack Reed is Head of Product at Planetary Systems AI. He can be reached via our Contact page.
