(Natural News) A destructive solar event destroyed 38 Starlink satellites owned by tech billionaire Elon Musk earlier this year, costing the company tens of millions of dollars in losses.

On Feb. 3, SpaceX launched 49 Starlink satellites into orbit from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The company thought nothing of this launch as Starlink regularly sends up a fresh batch of dozens of new satellites into space on a weekly basis as part of its plans to build a massive global internet network. (Related: GPS-dependent America is one solar storm away from collapse.)

However, around the same time the company launched the satellites, a massive wave of energetic solar particles and radiation swept through the planet, sparked by an explosion on the sun's surface. These eruptions are known as coronal mass ejections or solar flares and are space weather phenomena that can have all sorts of effects on the planet's atmosphere and on the satellites that surround it.

Once the material ejected by the sun reached Earth, it heated the atmosphere and raised the density of the small amounts of air at an altitude of 130 miles where the Starlink satellites were.