SpaceX deorbits original Starlink satellites amid reliability debate

On the morning of October 6, 2020, a Falcon 9 rocket climbed into the Florida sky from Kennedy Space Center, carrying 60 new Starlink satellites toward orbit. The launch had been delayed by weather and a last-second abort four days earlier, but it finally went. What SpaceX did not announce, and what few outside the spaceflight tracking community noticed, was that the company was simultaneously removing its oldest Starlink satellites from service—the very first batch it had ever deployed, now less than a year and a half old.

By early October, 39 of the original 60 v0.9 Starlink satellites launched in May 2019 had already deorbited. Most of that removal happened in a compressed window: 32 satellites came down between late August and early October alone. SpaceX had mentioned in January that it would conduct a "controlled de-orbit" of these first-generation satellites, citing improvements in the communications systems of newer models. The company offered no further explanation for why so many were coming down so quickly, or what exactly had prompted the accelerated timeline.

The silence invited interpretation. Viasat, a competitor in the satellite internet business, filed a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission in mid-September arguing that the deorbiting rate told a damning story: SpaceX's Starlink constellation was failing at a rate of 7 percent—far higher than the company's public claim of less than 1 percent failure. If that trajectory held across the full lifespan of a Starlink satellite, Viasat calculated, the actual failure rate could reach 22 percent. The company based its analysis partly on data compiled by Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer and spaceflight analyst who tracks orbital objects with meticulous precision.

McDowell pushed back hard. In his own FCC filing five days later, he argued that Viasat was conflating two different things: deliberate retirements of early prototypes and actual equipment failures. Treating the v0.9 satellites as failures, he wrote, was unjustifiable. They were first-generation hardware, designed to test the system, not production units meant to operate for years. Viasat had a response ready. In a follow-up filing, the company contended that SpaceX itself had treated the v0.9 satellites as integral to the Starlink system when reporting to the FCC in 2019. If they were good enough to count toward regulatory commitments then, Viasat argued, they should count as failures now. The company held firm: all deorbited satellites, whether retired by design or lost to malfunction, were relevant to assessing whether SpaceX was meeting its reliability promises to regulators.

SpaceX's reply, submitted to the FCC on September 29, was dismissive. The company stated that it had reported zero failures in its last 233 launched satellites and accused Viasat of letting ideology override evidence. "Viasat steadfastly refuses to allow facts to get in the way of the story it wishes were true," SpaceX wrote. But the company's filing contained a notable omission: it never explained why the v0.9 satellites were being deorbited in the first place, or whether the accelerated removal schedule reflected any operational concern. The question hung unanswered in the regulatory record.

What emerged from the filing exchange was a fundamental disagreement about how to measure success in a new industry. SpaceX saw the v0.9 satellites as early test units, their retirement a normal part of iterative development. Viasat saw them as part of a system SpaceX had committed to build and maintain to certain standards, and their removal as evidence of unmet promises. The dispute mattered because it would shape how regulators evaluated SpaceX's fitness to operate a massive constellation in Earth orbit—and because it would determine whether the company's reliability claims could be trusted. As SpaceX continued launching new batches of Starlink satellites at an accelerating pace, the question of what had gone wrong with the first ones remained officially unanswered.