It added, “These events illustrate the need for rapid characterization of anomalous events to enable elucidation of the operating environment.”
Starlink provided few details shortly after the December 2025 event, saying on December 18 that “an anomaly caused the ejection of propulsion tanks, rapid decay by about 4 km in semi-major axis, and the release of a small number of trackable low relative velocity objects.” Starlink said the satellite was “largely intact” but “wobbly”, and would re-enter Earth’s atmosphere and be “completely destroyed” within a few weeks.
In December, Starlink seemed confident that it could prevent future anomalies. “Our engineers are working quickly [identify the] To mitigate the root cause and source of the anomaly we are already in the process of deploying software in our vehicles that increases protection against this type of incident,” Starlink said in a Dec. 18 post.
We asked SpaceX today whether it has determined the cause of the December or Sunday anomaly, and we will update this article if we hear back.
Starlink reported near crash after Chinese launch
In a separate incident about a week before the “tumbling” satellite, Starlink also nearly crashed in December. Starlink senior VP Michael Nichols wrote on December 12 that a Chinese company had launched nine satellites without coordinating with other space users. Lack of coordination increases the risk of conflict, he said.
“As far as we know, no coordination or disruption was done with existing satellites operating in space, resulting in a distance of 200 meters between one of the deployed satellites and STARLINK-6079 (56120) at an altitude of 560 km,” Nichols wrote at the time, referring to the Chinese launch. “Much of the risk of operating in space comes from the lack of coordination between satellite operators – this needs to change.”
The coordination may only become more important if SpaceX follows through on its announced plan to launch one million satellites to create an orbital data center.
Under normal circumstances, Starlink satellites reaching their end-of-life date “follow a targeted re-entry approach to deorbit the satellites over open ocean, away from populated islands and heavily trafficked airline and maritime routes,” Starlink said in a document on “Satellite Demissibility.” But satellites falling unexpectedly to Earth should pose no threat to people on the ground because they are designed to be “destroyed with extremely low impact energy,” according to Starlink.
“A critical aspect of sustainable satellite design is fragmentation capability, which ensures that satellites do not completely break up and burn up during atmospheric re-entry,” Starlink says in the document. “Any fragment that is not completely destroyed should have negligible impact energy.”
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