SpaceX having issues with its new Gen 2 Starlink satellites

SpaceX has encountered some issues with its brand new “V2 mini” Starlink satellites. Avid watchers of the company’s satellites have spotted many lowering their altitudes over the last week.

Musk confirms issues with brand-new satellites

Speculation was circulating yesterday that SpaceX’s new Starlink satellites launched on the Group 6-1 mission in February were experiencing some problems in orbit. The first thoughts by astronomers were that SpaceX was debugging the first batch of V2 satellites.

SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk was the one to confirm the troubles the company was having with the satellites. “Lot of new technology in Starlink V2, so we’re experiencing some issues, as expected,” he said, “some sats will be deorbited, others will be tested thoroughly before raising altitude above Space Station.”

Right now, all of SpaceX’s first V2 mini satellites are still in orbit, but we expect some to start to reenter Earth’s atmosphere soon.

We expected more minis to launch, but now we know why not

When SpaceX gained the ability to launch its new Starlink satellite variant, we expected to see a lot more launches by now. Now that we know that the company has run into some issues, it possibly explains why SpaceX has seemingly returned to launching its previous satellite version, even into V2 orbits.

SpaceX’s V2 mini satellites are what they sound like, miniature versions of the much larger V2 satellites expected to launch on Starship. Unfortunately, the Falcon 9 doesn’t have the payload capacity to make it economical to launch full-size V2 Starlink satellites. Therefore, SpaceX created these intermediate versions of the new satellites equipped with upgraded antennas and cheaper argon thrusters instead of krypton.

I don’t think anyone is surprised that the first batch of the V2 mini-satellites ran into problems. There is always a learning curve when new hardware makes its way into space. However, SpaceX, a company very well-versed in operating satellites in space, should be able to adapt and return to launching V2 minis soon.