SpaceX's Starlink satellite network was back up and running on Friday as engineers hunted for the root cause of one of its biggest international outages the night before, a rare disruption for the powerful internet system set off by an internal software failure.

A shortage of rockets and competition for launch resources appear to be putting the mega-constellation's targets in doubt A Chinese mega-constellation of communications satellites is facing serious delays that could jeopardise its ambitions to compete with SpaceX's Starlink for valuable orbital resources.