Artemis II launch caused ionosphere disruption up to ten times stronger than Starship flights
From the Space digest for Nov 6, 2026
Sources International Business Times UK Primetimer
What happened: Researchers at National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan, in a preprint on the Earth and Space Science Open Archive, report that the April 1 launch of NASA's Artemis II disturbed the ionosphere across roughly 3,100 miles (5,000 km) of North America — effects up to ten times stronger than those recorded after SpaceX Starship test launches. Using GPS ground stations across the US, they traced large swings in free-electron counts to the launch, with the upper-stage fires about an hour after lift-off — at roughly 185 km altitude, pushing Orion out of Earth orbit toward the Moon — a source of the disturbance. The team implies potential GPS positioning errors of several metres; co-author Charles Lin told Space.com that "a positioning error of a couple of meters is enough to cause an autonomous car to change lanes," and said such effects will matter more as Moon and Mars traffic grows. The study documented no real vehicle errors or malfunctions, and the peer-review status is unconfirmed.
What's genuinely new: a second independent write-up of the same preprint adds the flight-geometry detail — the strongest disturbances came from the upper-stage burns about an hour after lift-off at roughly 185 km — and Lin's observation that no prior interplanetary mission had produced a comparable manoeuvre-driven disturbance.
Watch: peer-reviewed publication of the preprint, and whether future heavy-lift launches (Artemis III, Starship) draw similar measurements.