2.8 Days to Disaster: Low Earth Orbit Could Collapse Without Warning

A new analysis suggests modern satellite networks could suffer catastrophic collisions within days of losing control during a major solar storm.

The phrase “House of Cards” is often associated today with a Netflix political drama, but its original meaning refers to a structure that is inherently unstable. That idea is exactly how Sarah Thiele, who began this work as a PhD student at the University of British Columbia and is now at Princeton, and her co-authors describe today’s satellite mega constellation system in a new study released as a preprint on arXiv.

Their choice of words is supported by the numbers. Across all Low-Earth Orbit mega constellations, calculations show that a “close approach”, defined as two satellites passing within less than 1 kilometer of each other, happens about once every 22 seconds. For Starlink alone, such encounters occur roughly every 11 minutes. In addition, each of Starlink’s thousands of satellites must carry out an average of 41 maneuvers each year to avoid collisions with other objects in orbit.

At first glance, this may look like a carefully managed system functioning as intended. But engineers know that “edge cases”, events that fall outside normal operating conditions, are often what trigger major failures. According to the paper, solar storms represent one such edge case for satellite mega constellations. Under typical conditions, solar storms disrupt satellite operations in two main ways.

Solar storms as a systemic threat

First, they warm Earth’s upper atmosphere. That extra heating makes the air expand, which increases atmospheric drag on satellites and can also make it harder to predict their exact positions. With more drag, satellites must burn additional fuel to hold their planned orbits.

They may also need to spend fuel on avoidance maneuvers when projections suggest their trajectories could intersect with other satellites. During the “Gannon Storm” of May 2024 (which, unfortunately, appears not to be named after the Zelda villain) over half of all satellites in LEO have to use up at least some of their fuel on these repositioning maneuvers.

A second effect can be even more serious: solar storms can disable a satellite’s own navigation and communications systems. If that happens, the satellite may be unable to steer away from danger. When you combine that loss of control with the higher drag and greater positional uncertainty created by a heated atmosphere, it could lead to an immediate catastrophe.

Kessler syndrome is the most famous embodiment of this catastrophe, where a debris cloud around Earth makes it impossible for humans to launch anything into orbit (or beyond) without it being destroyed. But Kessler syndrome takes decades to fully develop. To showcase the immediacy of the problem these solar storms can cause, the authors came up with a new metric – the Collision Realization and Significant Harm (CRASH) Clock.

Days away from irreversible collisions

According to their calculations, as of June 2025, if satellite operators were to lose their ability to send commands for avoidance maneuvers, there would be a catastrophic collision in around 2.8 days. Compare that to the 121 days that they calculated would have been the case in 2018, before the megaconstellation era, and you can see why they are concerned. Perhaps even more disturbingly, if operators lose control for even just 24 hours, there’s a 30% chance of a catastrophic collision that could act as the seed case for the decades-long process of Kessler syndrome.

Fraser discusses current methods to avoid satellites crashing into each other.

Unfortunately, solar storms don’t come with much warning – maybe only a day or two at most. And even when they do, we can’t necessarily do anything about them other than trying to safeguard the satellites they could affect.

But the dynamic environment they introduce into the atmosphere necessitates real-time feedback and control to effectively manage those satellites. If that real-time control goes down, according to the paper, we only have a few days to get it back up before the entire house of cards comes crumbling down.

A known danger with lasting consequences

This isn’t idle speculation either. The 2024 Gannon storm was the strongest in decades, but we already know of a stronger one – the Carrington Event of 1859. That was the strongest solar storm on record, and if a similar event happened today, it would wipe out our ability to control our satellites for much longer than 3 days.

Paper author Sarah Thiele discusses the legal frameworks around orbital debris.

Essentially, a single event, of which there has already been precedence in historical memory, could wipe out our satellite infrastructure and leave us Earth-bound for the foreseeable future of humanity.

That doesn’t sound like a future that readers of this article would like to live in. And while there are trade-offs between utilizing the technical capabilities LEO mega-constellations give us and the risk that they pose to future space endeavors, it’s best to have a realistic assessment of those risks. When it comes to the potential of losing access to space for generations because of one particularly bad solar storm, it’s best to at least make informed decisions, and this paper certainly helps to create those.

Reference: “An orbital house of cards: Frequent megaconstellation close conjunctions” by Sarah Thiele, Skye R. Heiland, Aaron C. Boley and Samantha M. Lawler, 10 December 2025, arXiv.
DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2512.09643

Adapted from an article originally published on Universe Today.

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