Space X's high-flying internet plans have taken a hit.

As the American space company announced on Wednesday, 40 of its satellites were hit by a solar storm.

This damaged them so badly that they could not be put into their intended orbit and had to be crashed.

Stephen Finsterbusch

Editor in Business.

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As the company announced, a Falcon 9 rocket shot 49 Earth satellites into space last Thursday.

They were deployed as planned at an altitude of 210 kilometers.

There they should make a kind of test lap around the earth and then set course for the final orbit at a height of 550 kilometers.

They were part of the Starlink network.

One day this will consist of a total of around 40,000 satellites.

Space X is building this satellite network to install a kind of internet from space.

Among other things, the company wants to connect remote regions of the world to the global data networks.

But the satellites deployed on Thursday were caught by a so-called solar storm on Friday, Space X said in a statement.

What is a solar storm?

The phenomenon is not only well known in space travel.

It has its starting point on the sun.

It's usually pretty turbulent there.

After all, the sun consists of a mixture of gases that is constantly in motion.

In this way, it sends permanent streams of glowing matter into space.

These streams can suddenly shoot up tens of thousands of kilometers like a fountain and then move through space in the form of plasma clouds at speeds of up to a thousand kilometers per second as a solar storm.

Such a storm reached the earth within a very short time.

The blue planet is largely protected from these hot storms by its atmosphere and magnetic field.

Nevertheless, they can severely disturb the earth's magnetic field - and this has consequences for radio and mobile phone reception, for the operation of the power grid and for the satellites that move around the world.

Here the solar storm can blind the control sensors, damage the solar cells or temporarily disable the on-board computers - and such a cosmic storm has caught the 49 satellites of Space X.

As the company has now explained, the atmospheric resistance when the rocket was launched was up to half the values ​​of previous launches due to the particle storm emanating from the sun.

The team tried to guide the satellites, each weighing around a quarter of a ton, into a safe flight mode.

But that was largely unsuccessful.

The greater resistance blocked the ascent of most of the satellites to higher spheres.

Your flight had to be cancelled.

40 of the artificial satellites fell back into the atmosphere.

According to Space X, they are designed and built to burn up completely in Earth's atmosphere, leaving no debris that could hit Earth.

The crash has put a damper on the plan for the Internet from space, but it will not detract from it.

Space X has been building its celestial web for years.

Since 2019, the satellites have been gradually launched into space.

Around 1,800 of these satellites are now circling around the earth in a fixed orbit.

So they form a network that is already able to offer Internet access via satellite.

Around 145,000 users in 25 countries are already using it.

In total, there are limited permits for the launch of around 12,000 satellites until 2027.

In addition, Space X has submitted applications for orbits of another 30,000 satellites.

However, the entire project did not come to a standstill due to the solar winds alone.

Rather, a very earthly problem also caused delays: the bottlenecks on the semiconductor markets.

At the end of last year, Space X was not able to build as many satellites as it actually wanted.