SpaceX’s Starlink dodged 300,000 satellite collisions in 2025

A report filed by SpaceX with the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in late December reveals some surprising information, including that its Starlink satellites had to perform around 300,000 maneuvers to avoid collisions in 2025.

Starlink is a mega-constellation of satellites that broadcast internet to the ground. The first Starlink satellites were launched in 2019; they now number around 9,400, representing 65 percent of all active satellites in orbit.

The FCC requires SpaceX to issue an update every six months on Starlink’s approach to safety, given that two satellites could produce thousands of debris if they collide in space, potentially rendering parts of Earth’s orbit unusable or leading to a cascade of collisions.

In its latest report filed on December 31, SpaceX says its Starlink satellites performed approximately 149,000 collision avoidance maneuvers between June and November 2025. Such maneuvers are performed when two satellites are deemed too close to each other and pose a reasonable risk of collision.

The industry standard is to maneuver when there is a 1 in 10,000 risk of collision, but SpaceX is more conservative and maneuvers with a 3 in 10 million risk.

In addition to the 144,000 maneuvers previously reported by SpaceX between December 2024 and May 2025, that’s about 300,000 in 2025, an increase of about 50% from the 200,000 maneuvers in 2024. “That’s a huge amount of maneuvers,” says Hugh Lewis of the University of Birmingham, UK. “It’s just an incredibly high number.”

Most other satellite operators in the United States and abroad do not publish their maneuver numbers, but a typical pre-Starlink satellite might have performed a handful of maneuvers per year. According to SpaceX figures, it performs up to 40 maneuvers per year per satellite.

Lewis says the company is on track to perform 1 million maneuvers each year by 2027, and that several other mega-constellations are also deployed in the United States and China, meaning the number of potential collisions will increase. “From a physical standpoint, it’s not good,” Lewis says. “We’re heading toward a pretty bad scenario in orbit. It’s not sustainable.”

In its latest report, SpaceX also revealed, for the first time, repeated encounters with other satellites. He singled out a Chinese satellite, called Honghu-2, as having made more than 1,000 close approaches with its Starlink satellites, likely because they operate in similar orbits.

“This shows how much SpaceX really has this orbit,” says Samantha Lawler of the University of Regina in Canada, most of whose Starlink satellites operate at altitudes between 340 and 570 kilometers. “According to the Outer Space Treaty, everyone is supposed to have access to all parts of space, but they have somehow occupied it.”

SpaceX also revealed details of a Starlink satellite that exploded in December, releasing dozens of debris. It said the cause was a “suspected hardware failure” and added that it had “identified and removed” the responsible components from future Starlink designs.

Starlink uses an autonomous system to avoid collisions and cope with the large number of maneuvers required. However, SpaceX said it had an incident in which a spacecraft operated by Japanese company Astroscale “performed an unexpected maneuver,” which could have increased the risk of collision with a Starlink satellite.

Astroscale disagrees with this version of events. A spokesperson said the company publicly announced the planned maneuver in advance and that it was “conducted in accordance with Japanese on-orbit maintenance guidelines.” SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment.

However, it is the total number of maneuvers that constitutes the most striking statistic. “They do all these maneuvers and they do them perfectly,” Lawler says. “But if they make a mistake, we’ll be in really big trouble.”

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