Why did SpaceX just ask to launch 1 million satellites?

SpaceX satellite launch at Kennedy Space Center in Florida

Geopix/Alamy

We’re only a month into 2026, but it’s already clear what will be one of the major space stories of the year: megaconstellations and ongoing attempts to launch thousands of satellites into Earth orbit.

The latest development is that SpaceX has applied to the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for permission to launch 1 million data center orbiting satellites. The request is unprecedented. The previous largest FCC filing, also by SpaceX, involved 42,000 Starlink satellites in 2019.

“This is beyond what any constellation has suggested,” he says Victoria Samson at the Secure World Foundation in the US.

SpaceX already operates the largest fleet of satellites in orbit, the Starlink Internet constellation, which makes up about 9,500 of the 14,500 satellites in orbit — but the fleet represents just 1 percent of the planned satellites for SpaceX’s orbital data centers. Starlink satellites alone are already creating dangerous orbital conditions, with SpaceX having to avoid 300,000 collisions by 2025.

The latest in the company filing on January 30 and also shared in an update SpaceX, written by CEO Elon Musk, has said it wants to develop large-scale orbital data centers in space to power artificial intelligence. “Launching a constellation of a million satellites that act as orbital data centers is the first step toward becoming a Kardashev Level II civilization,” Musk wrote, referring to the Kardashev Scale, a method devised by Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev in 1964 to measure a civilization’s technological prowess.

The idea of launching data centers into space where they can receive continuous sunlight has become popular over the past few years as the energy demands of AI have skyrocketed. In November 2025, US company Starcloud launched a demonstration data center containing an advanced Nvidia chip into space, while the European Commission recently conducted the study that said orbital data centers were reachable.

Musk said the constellation launch would be possible using SpaceX’s reusable Starship rocket, currently under development, the most powerful rocket in history. “With launches every hour at 200 tons per flight, Starship will transport millions of tons into orbit and beyond annually, enabling an exciting future where humanity will explore among the stars,” he wrote.

The filing preceded the Feb. 2 announcement that SpaceX would acquire xAI, another Musk company that owns social network X and the controversial Grok chatbot. “If AI is what they want orbital data centers for, then it’s a bit of a bundled package,” he says Ruth Pritchard-Kelly, expert in satellite regulation in the USA.

SpaceX is not alone in its ambition to send many more satellites into orbit. On December 29, China submitted a request to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the United Nations body that allocates portions of the radio spectrum in space, to launch 200,000 satellites into orbit. While there is no defined limit to how many satellites can be safely launched, previous studies have suggested that it might be possible to operate millions of satellites in orbit, although anything above 100,000 is considered extremely difficult to control.

The FCC will take months to decide whether to approve SpaceX’s application, during which time it will open the application for public comment, while a separate filing with the ITU will also be required. If the FCC approves, SpaceX would normally be given six years to deploy half of the constellation — a requirement usually set by the FCC — but SpaceX asked to waive that requirement, arguing that the satellites will mostly communicate via optical links and won’t cause radio interference.

SpaceX said it will operate the satellites at altitudes between 500 and 2,000 kilometers in slightly polar orbits, mostly above where Starlink currently operates. The size of each proposed satellite is unknown, but assuming they are similar in size to current Starlink satellites and each starship could carry about 100 such satellites, 10,000 starship launches would be required to complete the constellation.

Assuming an hourly launch, as Musk proposed, it would take just over a year to deploy 1 million satellites. SpaceX says it would maintain the safety of Earth orbit by placing satellites at the end of their lives in “disposal orbits” either high above Earth, where they would take centuries to fall back to the planet, or in orbit around the Sun.

Musk’s proposed megaconstellation would have a significant impact on astronomy. SpaceX said in its filing that it “will continue its long history of successful collaboration and innovation with the scientific and astronomical community.” However, in December, Alejandro Borlaff at the NASA Ames Research Center in California and his colleagues found out adding 500,000 satellites into Earth orbit would mean “almost every single telescope image taken from Earth or space will be contaminated by satellites,” Borlaff says, impacting scientific discovery.

Orbital data center satellites could be even brighter than many existing satellites because they would require not only large reflective solar panels to generate power, but also large radiators to expel heat into the vacuum of space, like those on the International Space Station.

Whether SpaceX is serious about launching 1 million satellites is another question: instead, it may be something of a joke from Musk, Pritchard-Kelly says, given the absurdity of the number. “It’s huge,” he says. “It could just be for shock and awe”, with the actual number of planned satellites likely to be much lower. SpaceX and the FCC did not respond to a request for comment.