Not just thousands. In an FCC filing, the company mentions deploying up to a staggering ‘one million satellites’ in orbits ranging from 500 kilometers to 2,000km.
SpaceX is requesting to launch up to one million satellites to create a network of orbiting data centers around Earth.
Late on Friday, the company filed the request with the Federal Communications Commission, describing the project as a “constellation of satellites with unprecedented computing capacity to power advanced artificial intelligence (‘AI’) models and the applications that rely on them.”
The plan is shocking in its scope, dwarfing the existing Starlink constellation, which currently spans over 9,600 satellites in Earth’s orbit.
In one 8-page document, SpaceX describes the company’s proposed “Orbital Data Center system.” “To deliver the compute capacity required for large scale AI inference and data center applications serving billions of users globally, SpaceX aims to deploy a system of up to one million satellites to operate within narrow orbital shells spanning up to 50 km each (leaving sufficient room to deconflict against other systems with comparable ambitions),” the company wrote.
