There's a Starlink waiting in the sky... 7,000 in fact.Can Elon Musk stop them crashing to Earth?

As he was preparing his fields for seeding this year, Barry Sawchuk came across a giant slab of space debris. It had come from a spacecraft belonging to Elon Musk’s company, SpaceX.

- William Hosie

News of the Spielberg-esque incident in central Canada piqued the interest of Sawchuk’s neighbour, Dr Sam Lawler, a professor of astronomy at Campion College at the University of Regina. She began to look more closely into SpaceX’s flagship project, Starlink, and what she has evinced is, some might say, alarming.

Starlink is the world’s largest satellite constellation, with 7,000 in low Earth orbit designed to build a global mobile broadband. Starlink was announced in 2015 and named after a reference in John Green’s novel, The Fault in Our Stars. It is facing sanctions in Brazil, following a fracas between Musk and President Lula’s government over disinformation running rampant on X. Otherwise, things are going swimmingly, with Starlink projected to earn $6.6 billion (£5 billion) in revenue by the end of the year. Parent company SpaceX is valued at $210 billion.