It missed us by 9 days

Actually it appears that the Carrington event wasn't the most powerful geomagnetic storm in recorded history only one of the stronger ones which was much more notable as the CME associated with it was observed the strongest one was likely the one 13  years later in 1872 based on . But the last big solar superstorm comparable to the Carrington event was in 1921.  Additionally thanks to tree rings and ice cores we now know of some storms which appear to have made the Carrington event and those like it look tiny in comparison being at least some 10 to 20 times stronger in the case of an extreme event in 775.  Other super Carrington events which were somewhat weaker are known from 660BCE and 995, with events comparable to the storm of 775 having been identified around 7176 BCE and 5259 BCE.  In other words these geomagnetic storms are far more common than we used to think. 

Also as a fun fact about geomagnetic storms it turns out the Sun isn't the only thing which can produce them as superflares from young "nearby" magnetars in the Large Magellanic Cloud or Milky Way are also powerful enough to induce geomagnetic storms  such as the event on March 5th 1979 caused by a magnetar within LMC N49 known as SGR 0525-66 , another two events originating from within the milky way  from SGR1900+14  which struck Earth on August 27th 1998  and  SGR 1806-20 which struck Earth on December 27th 2004. As the closest of these events was only several tens of kiloparsecs away (~40,000 light years) and were able to  induce geomagnetic storms comparable to weak CMEs from our Sun it indicates these are truly extremely energetic flare events. In fact we have been able to observe such flares from extragalactic sources at Mega parsec distances though thankfully without geomagnetic storms and these flares may even be linked to at least some of the events known as Fast Radio Bursts according to observations by Chime raising truly alarming prospects about how powerful such flare events might be from magnetars far closer than  tens of kiloparsecs from a  planet especially as evidence suggests magnetars burn out the extreme magnetic fields that power such events within around 10,000 years.  We are talking about flares that come from 40 to 50 thousand light years away but are still powerful enough to induce weak geomagnetic storms on Earth... That is F-ing insane and if FRB's are linked to these flares as seems likely then there are examples out there so powerful that faint radio echoes can be seen from giga parsec distances.  The power of nature is is incomprehensibly awe inspiring.


Regarding the Space X satellites falling out of orbit one important detail missed is that atmospheric gravity-buoyancy waves have been shown to serve as the counterbalancing force to counteract the inflation of Earth's thermosphere due to solar activity (aka these waves induce cooling in the thermosphere)  Early 2021 when the flare hit Earth the Northern hemisphere was experiencing a strong Sudden Stratospheric Warming Event which cuts off the coupling of these waves and the upper atmosphere as these waves dampen out in the stratosphere instead of propagating into the mesosphere and thermosphere meaning the Earth's thermosphere cooling response is severely impaired meaning the rate of  cooling is greatly slowed down. This meant that the normal atmospheric expansion compensation methods used by low Earth orbit satellite operators didn't work well.  I recommend looking up work by Erdal Yiggit which looks into these effects after showing that the effects of these waves can't be neglected in the upper atmosphere thanks to the effects  momentum conservation and energy conservation induce on these waves amplitudes as the atmospheric density decreases.