Solar flares are no joke, especially if your community depends on wireless communication.
Credit: NASA
The Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), the UK government’s research body, has published the fourth edition of its report, “Severe Weather Environment Summary.” As the name suggests, it’s a banger of a read.
The main takeaway is that many human technologies are more vulnerable to space weather than people believe, and more importantly, they become more vulnerable year by year.
The report focuses on “extreme” scenarios, which basically means a solar flare that happens every 100 to 200 years or so. Events with that kind of frequency have a reasonable chance of occurring in any given year—and, historically, can still happen even if something similar happened recently.
The STFC report defines space weather as “disturbances of the upper atmosphere and near-Earth space that disrupt many technological systems—and, in a few cases, pose a direct threat to human life.” It shows that large space weather events can knock out satellites, including GPS satellites, and terrestrial power grids.
This figure breaks down the atmospheric climate, as seen by the STFC.
Credit: Science and Technology Resources Council
These events can last for two weeks, but they can do more than just temporarily disrupt communication; they can also damage infrastructure, requiring long-term maintenance and increasing downtime for critical land systems. This includes services that will be deployed directly, such as GPS, and indirectly, such as aircraft that rely on GPS for safe navigation.
The STFC sums it up as “very likely” that a global system failure will continue, causing further problems that are “extremely difficult to predict.”
Blown transformers and even regional blackouts may be the least of our worries. A real danger, and one that is not difficult to predict, the destruction of many or all satellites in space during the event. Constellations (and large constellations) become more and more fault tolerant as they fill in the sky.
In December, we reported that a disruption in satellite control would not take long to cause a catastrophic collision, and that each new satellite added to low Earth orbit brings the entire situation closer to disaster.
2025 saw more than 4000 new satellites enter orbit.
Credit: ESA
SpaceX has pushed its Stargaze program to alleviate these fears, saying it will be able to track and connect thousands, and eventually tens of thousands, of additional objects in LEO, but these programs remain vulnerable to space weather.
Now, SpaceX and others will point out that, should the sun’s weather disrupt navigation, their satellites are designed to slowly drift through space and burn up. That’s what happened in 2022, when a geomagnetic storm attacked the newly launched Starlink satellites, destroying 40 units. That seems like a win, on the face of it, but the report describes the potential impacts of storms worse than those seen in 2022.
Finally, the report examines the risks to crewed space missions, even though NASA and its space program have made great sacrifices in not being able to fully protect crews from the most unexpected events.
For the foreseeable future, astronauts will simply have to plan their schedules around the less predicted solar activity times and hope for the best. All of us, the safest in the world, can and should want it better.
