SpaceX’s Starlink has avoided 300,000 satellite collisions by 2025

A report that SpaceX submitted to the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in late December reveals some surprising information – including that its Starlink satellites will have had to perform about 300,000 collision avoidance maneuvers in 2025.

Starlink is a mega-constellation of satellites that bring the Internet to earth. The first Starlink satellites were launched in 2019; now there are about 9,400, representing 65 percent of all active satellites in orbit.

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

In its latest report, filed Dec. 31, SpaceX said its Starlink satellites performed about 149,000 collision avoidance maneuvers between June and November 2025. Such maneuvers are performed when two satellites are deemed to be passing too close together and have 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 at a 3 in 10 million risk.

In addition to the 144,000 maneuvers that SpaceX previously reported from December 2024 to May 2025, this represents about 300,000 maneuvers in 2025, an increase of about 50 percent from the 200,000 maneuvers in 2024. “That’s a huge number of maneuvers Hugh Lewis at the University of Birmingham, UK. “It’s an incredibly high number.”

Most other satellite operators in the US and abroad do not publish their maneuver data, but a typical pre-Starlink satellite might have performed several maneuvers per year. According to SpaceX data, it performs up to 40 maneuvers per year for each satellite.

Lewis says the company is on track to perform 1 million maneuvers each year by 2027, with several other mega-constellations in the US and China also deployed – meaning the number of potential collisions will grow. “It’s not good from a physical point of view,” says Lewis. “We’re moving towards 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 chose a Chinese satellite called Honghu-2, which has more than 1,000 close approaches with its Starlink satellites, presumably because they operate in similar orbits.

“It highlights how SpaceX really owns this orbit,” he says Samantha Lawler at the University of Regina in Canada, with most of its Starlink satellites operating at altitudes between 340 and 570 kilometers. “According to the Space Treaty, everyone is supposed to have access to all parts of space, but somehow they occupied it.

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

Starlink uses an autonomous system to avoid collisions and cope with the huge number of maneuvers required. However, SpaceX said there was one incident in which a spacecraft operated by Japan’s Astroscale “conducted an unannounced maneuver” that could have increased the risk of a collision with a Starlink satellite.

Astroscale disagrees with this version of events. A spokesman said the company had publicly shared the planned maneuver in advance and it was “conducted in accordance with Japan’s in-orbit handling guidelines”. SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment.

However, the most eye-catching statistic is the total number of maneuvers. “They do all these maneuvers and they do them perfectly,” Lawler says. “But if they make a mistake, we have a really big problem.

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