On February 8, 2022, 38 satellites en route to the SpaceX Starlink constellation lost altitude and fell into the atmosphere because of a space weather event that scientists later categorized as a G1 storm — the lowest level on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) solar storm scale. Researchers estimated the value of the lost satellites and largely wasted launch at close to $50 million.
Three decades earlier, in March 1989, a powerful geomagnetic storm induced by a solar flare led to the collapse of the Hydro-Quebec power grid in eastern Canada. A 2002 study in Space Weather, a journal of the American Geophysical Union, estimated the storm’s impact at $13.2 million, including the cost to upgrade the network to prevent future similar occurrences.
Although limited in scope, the two geomagnetic events exacted a punishing financial toll on spacecraft and power-generating equipment. They also shed light on the potential consequences of a larger space weather event involving more widespread effects.
Historically speaking, 1859’s Carrington Event stands at the apex of epic geomagnetic storms. Named for British astronomer Richard Carrington, who observed sunspots just prior to the event in early September of that year, the event produced an aurora visible as far south as Colombia. New Yorkers read their evening newspapers by it, and telegraph offices — operating the most advanced electrical equipment of the era — reported widespread outages, with devices sparking and catching fire.
Scientists described the event as three to five times larger than any other solar storm in recorded history. Had it occurred in our time, they say, the consequences would be catastrophic and possibly amount to trillions of dollars in losses globally. Power grids and electronic systems would fail due to massive power surges; GPS-guided navigation, banking and agriculture would collapse; and virtually all communication systems would stop working, according to some predictions.
Insurer Lloyd’s of London, investigating the topic for a 2013 report, said that a Carrington-like event lasting “weeks or more” would cause “major disruption to transport, food supplies, emergency and hospital services amongst other things.”
It added, “If pumping operations needed to be suspended that would quickly affect water and fuel supplies, sewage systems and flood defences. … The absence of such fundamental services could lead to major and widespread social unrest, riots and theft with ramifications for the insurance industry and society in general.”
Researchers say the chances of another such storm are slim at any given time and depend on several factors occurring simultaneously, including the size and duration of the solar flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs) and Earth’s angle toward the sun during the events. A NASA webpage about solar storms reports that they typically begin with a solar flare. X-rays and waves of extreme UV radiation produced by the flare travel across space at light speed, ionizing the upper layers of Earth’s atmosphere and creating a solar electromagnetic pulse. Minutes to hours later, waves of electrons and protons reach the planet, electrifying satellites and damaging their electronics. A day or more after that come CMEs — billion-ton clouds of magnetized plasma.
Many analysts believe that a direct hit by an extremely large CME, such as one that missed Earth in July 2012, would trigger widespread power blackouts, disabling virtually everything that plugs into a wall socket. Most people wouldn’t be able to flush a toilet because urban water supplies are largely dependent on electric pumps, Lloyd’s wrote.
The insurer’s report, which was produced with assistance from Atmospheric and Environmental Research Inc., said that while the probability of an extreme solar storm is “relatively low at any given time, it is almost inevitable that one will occur eventually.” A separate 2019 study published in the journal Nature put the chances of a Carrington event at about 1.9% in the following decade. Another paper widely circulated in 2012 said the odds of a Carrington storm were about 12% in the following decade.
If one does occur, many scientists agree it would inflict staggeringly high economic losses. A 2017 study from researchers at Cambridge University examined the costs of a Carrington-like blackout within the United States. It looked at potential costs inside and outside the blackout zone, including indirect domestic and international supply chain losses.
Under the most extreme scenario — affecting 66% of the U.S. population — the domestic economic loss would amount to $41.5 billion per day, plus an additional $7 billion loss through the international supply chain, the study said.
“We felt it was important to look at how extreme space weather may affect domestic U.S. production in various economic sectors, including manufacturing, government and finance, as well as the potential economic loss in other nations owing to supply chain linkages,” co-author Edward Oughton, of the Cambridge Centre for Risk Studies at Cambridge Judge Business School, said at the time in a release from the American Geophysical Union, which published the study.
The report explored three geographical scenarios for blackouts caused by extreme space weather, depending on the latitudes affected by different types of incidents. If only states in extreme northern latitudes are affected, with 8% of the U.S. population, “the economic loss per day could reach $6.2 billion supplemented by an international supply chain loss of $0.8 billion,” the study said. A scenario affecting 23% of the population could have a daily cost of $16.5 billion plus $2.2 billion internationally, while a third scenario affecting 44% of the population could produce a daily cost of $37.7 billion in the U.S. plus $4.8 billion globally. The study was calculated based on 2011 U.S. dollars.
Such reports, together with recent solar events — including 1989’s power grid failure in Quebec — have spurred governments and industry leaders to seek potential solutions for a Carrington-like storm. Many power grids, for example, have added trip switches that turn off during large spikes in amperage to protect power lines and stop transformers from burning out, as they did in 1989.
Satellite manufacturers are responding as well, heeding NASA and NOAA reports of extreme space weather to avoid orbital degradation — which falls under the “best practices” heading — and adding more resilient systems to spacecraft to withstand the waves of radiation and electrically charged particles created by solar flares and CMEs. A June 2017 Space Weather article reports that the costs of not doing so are astronomical, on the order of $10,000 per minute, when penalties are assessed. The study recommends continued technological improvements and increased training of satellite operators, but it generally sounded an optimistic tone: “While concerns about space weather impacts to our technological infrastructure are growing, the overall perception from satellite industry stakeholders is that effects on satellites are diminishing as research has matured, awareness has increased, and mitigation strategies have been improved and implemented.”
Jamie Favors, director of the NASA Space Weather Program in the Heliophysics Division, told Apogee that government agencies and satellite operators have benefited from increased awareness about space weather, particularly as the science around the issue has matured and as researchers have gleaned more data from deep space satellites.
“I think that a lot of what has occurred that’s been really helpful [to our understanding of space weather] has been in the last 10 or more years,” he said. “I’ve seen a lot of awareness and coordination, and I think more people realize that space weather could be a concern for them, and then that starts the conversation on the resilience side of things, to be better prepared for these events.”
Recognizing the threat posed by space weather, NOAA, NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) have stepped up monitoring efforts, in particular of solar flares and CMEs. In February 2015, NOAA launched its Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) satellite to augment the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), which was deployed into deep space 20 years earlier and is maintained by NASA and the ESA.
DSCOVR can measure increases of density in space, total interplanetary magnetic field strength and solar wind speed. At elevated levels, these measurements can indicate the existence of a possible Earth-bound “CME-associated interplanetary shock ahead of the magnetic cloud,” according to NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center. Such awareness can allow for “15 to 60 minutes advanced warning of shock arrival at Earth — and any possible sudden impulse or sudden storm commencement, as registered by Earth-based magnetometers.”
These waves of electromagnetic radiation can trigger radio blackouts and severe interference of UHF and VHF signals — affecting planes and military radar systems — and produce drag on satellites, potentially causing them to lose orbit. In the case of the Starlink satellites in 2022, the spacecraft encountered increased density from ionized particles that resulted in drag, and their electric propulsion systems could not overcome the increased density, causing them to lose altitude, according to news reports and studies. Thirty-eight of the 49 satellites fell from space.
The DSCOVR and SOHO spacecraft are positioned at Lagrange point 1, or L1 — about 1.5 million kilometers from Earth — where the gravitational pull of Earth and the sun is roughly equal, NASA said.
Additionally, in 2016 the White House directed federal agencies to develop plans to mitigate the impacts of severe space weather. The measures have continued through subsequent administrations. And in 2020, Congress approved the Promoting Research and Observations of Space Weather to Improve the Forecasting of Tomorrow Act, which mandated a coordinated federal response to severe solar storms.
Under the act, NOAA was required to improve space weather forecasting and to work with commercial satellite operators on data. The administration also provides alerts on its website about space weather threats and reaches out about pending geomagnetic storms to power grid operators through the North American Electric Reliability Corp.
“There definitely has been progress on the resilience of infrastructure both here on the planet and in space, even from a NASA standpoint, being prepared for these types of events, so I think that has been obviously part of the story,” Favors said. “I’m not so sure that was really the case all that long ago, people being aware that this was the risk to them and then wanting to learn more.”
In Europe, the ESA is building a second solar monitoring satellite. Unlike DSCOVR and SOHO, which are positioned in a direct line between Earth and the sun at Lagrange point L1, the new ESA satellite known as Vigil would be positioned at Lagrange point 5, L5, which is about 30 million kilometers from Earth and not in a direct line with the sun. This will enable Vigil to view the sun from its side and potentially allow for more advanced warning of damaging solar flares and CMEs, the agency said. Airbus UK is overseeing the spacecraft’s development. Technologies created earlier by NASA and the ESA would be included. Set to launch in 2031, the satellite takes its name from the Latin “vigilis exceptus,” meaning sentry, and also “vigilia,” which translates to “wakefulness” and the act of keeping alert.
“By keeping an eagle eye on the ‘side’ of the Sun, the spacecraft will stream a constant feed of near real-time data on potentially hazardous solar activity, before it rolls into view from Earth,” according to an ESA webpage. “The mission will give us advance warning of oncoming solar storms and therefore more time to protect spacecraft in orbit, infrastructure on the ground and explorers now and in the future, unshielded by Earth’s magnetic field and vulnerable to our star’s violent outbursts.”
Since 1975, NOAA’s Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES) have served as the nation’s workhorse for weather monitoring — terrestrially and in space. With the increased emphasis on space weather, NOAA added a new instrument called a Compact Coronagraph (CCOR-1), a type of solar telescope, to its latest GOES spacecraft. The technology, developed by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, is designed to observe solar activity and provide data related to the size, mass, speed and direction of CMEs. Testing for CCOR-1 began after it was launched aboard a GOES-U satellite in June 2024. In late September of that year, CCOR-1 captured its first images of a CME.
“The CCOR-1 video shows a clearly defined CME emerging from the east limb (left side) of the sun around the 10:00 time mark, with Universal Time (UT) shown at the lower left,” said an October 2024 NOAA news release. “The sun also dazzles with its small and large streamers, bright radial structures along which the solar plasma travels steadily outward. The CME explosions bend and sometimes disrupt the streaming plasma, buzzing past it at speeds of hundreds to thousands of miles per second.”
Also in 2025, NOAA plans to launch its Space Weather Follow On-Lagrange 1 (SWFO-L1) satellite on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. SWFO-L1’s suite of instruments is designed to make real-time measurements of solar wind, thermal plasma and the magnetic field, according to a NOAA webpage. Additionally, the spacecraft will be equipped with a CCOR instrument to detect coronal mass ejections. Its launch, set for September, comes as the SOHO and DSCOVR satellites are nearing the end of their missions, which have already been extended multiple times.
Other satellites that monitor solar activity include the Global Geospace Science “Wind” satellite, which measures the mass, momentum and energy of solar wind, and the Advanced Composition Explorer, which analyzes solar particles, from solar wind ions to galactic cosmic ray nuclei. Both spacecraft operate from the L1 Lagrange point.
As our understanding of space weather grows, our ability to withstand extreme space weather, even a Carrington-type event, through technology and improved warning systems will also grow, Favors said. “I’m deeply optimistic because I’m also patient. We’re not going to get there tomorrow … but it’s coming together, and it will happen.”