NO SIGNS OF LIFE

Satellite Backed by Musk and Bezos Just Died in Space

The MethaneSAT satellite, worth an estimated $88 million and designed to monitor the growth of greenhouse gases, has “lost power” and is “likely not recoverable.”

A climate change-monitoring satellite worth $88 million, launched by Elon Musk with the backing of Google and Jeff Bezos, has suffered what’s been described as a catastrophic system failure. The spacecraft—designed to monitor the atmospheric growth of methane, a greenhouse gas that accounts for more than thirty percent of global warming—has apparently “lost power” and is “likely not recoverable,” according to a report from the Financial Times. “The engineering team is conducting a thorough investigation into the loss of communication. This is expected to take time,” MethaneSAT, the company overseeing the project, said in a statement. Previously described as “one of the most advanced methane tracking satellites in space,” the craft had been sent into orbit by SpaceX in March 2024, with a share of funding provided by the Bezos Earth Fund and Google contributing AI computing capabilities to help crunch the massive amounts of data yielded by the project’s monitoring activities. It remains unclear at this stage whether a new satellite will be launched to replace the one that’s failed.