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Originally posted by nhtagmember:
Total loss of tge payload.

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"Although the stage survived and still deployed the satellites, it did not successfully circularize its orbit, but it did passivate itself as normally performed at the end of each mission," the company added. "This left the satellites in an eccentric orbit with a very low perigee of 135 km [84 miles], which is less than half the expected perigee altitude."

SpaceX engineers worked to get the 20 Starlink satellites — 13 of which were capable of beaming service directly to cell phones — to raise their orbits using their onboard ion thrusters. But the hill was too steep to climb, according to the company.

"At this level of drag, our maximum available thrust is unlikely to be enough to successfully raise the satellites," SpaceX wrote in the update. "As such, the satellites will reenter Earth’s atmosphere and fully demise.