Elon Musk has been accused of “space warfare” after some of the satellites he launched for a groundbreaking global internet project had a near miss with China’s new space station.

Satellites from Starlink Internet Services, a division of Musk’s SpaceX aerospace company, had two “close encounters” with the Chinese space station in July and October, according to a document submitted by China to the UN’s space agency earlier this month.

“For safety reasons, the China Space Station implemented preventive collision avoidance control,” China said in a report published on the website of the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs.

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Mr Musk’s Starlink project to blanket the world with universal internet coverage has hit stumbling blocks before in China, which keeps information tightly controlled.

A copy of the report circulated on Monday on Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter, where several users referred to the project as “space warfare”.

Read more: yahoo