SATELLITE FALL TIME

Return trip. In February, a solar storm hit 49 of SpaceX’s Starlink satellites, destabilizing their orbits enough to send them careening back to Earth. Thankfully, they were small and burned up in Earth’s atmosphere, but not every object circling above our heads will simply disappear on its way down. While thus far no one has died from space debris (that we know of), space agencies do have contingency plans. Above we take a look at how long — in comparison to Earth timelines — it would take a satellite at various heights to fall naturally, and the actual plans space agencies have in place, should satellites at specific heights start to fall.