SpaceX, or Space Exploration Technologies Corp., founded in 2002, is an American space technology company and a dominant launch provider. It designs, manufactures, and launches advanced rockets and spacecraft, including the Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, Dragon spacecraft, and Starship. SpaceX partners with organizations like NASA and the United States Armed Forces and is known for its advancements in reusable launch vehicles, human spaceflight, and satellite constellation technology like Starlink. Key words: launch provider, reusable rockets, space exploration, Starlink, Falcon, Dragon, Starship, NASA.
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Declining launch costs enabled by platforms like SpaceX Starship are making orbital solar energy increasingly economically viable for global baseload power.
SpaceX intends to move compute-heavy AI workloads to orbit to bypass rising electricity costs and grid limitations affecting terrestrial data centers.
SpaceX conducted 62 Starlink launches in the first half of 2025.
SpaceX will provide collision assessment data via its proprietary management platform to other satellite operators.
SpaceX submitted an application to the Federal Communications Commission on January 30, 2026 seeking authority to launch and operate up to one million satellites designed to function as an Orbital Data Center network.
SpaceX recently reached its 11,000th Starlink satellite launch.
SpaceX submitted an application to the Federal Communications Commission on January 30 to deploy a constellation of up to one million satellites dedicated to space-based data processing.
SpaceX is expected to begin pilot testing of on-orbit compute nodes on standard Starlink V3 hardware later this year.
SpaceX frames the proposed satellite network as the world’s first large-scale Orbital Data Center network.
SpaceX launched 96 missions in 2023, more than all other launch providers worldwide combined.
Jonathan McDowell analyzed the ITU filing tray and counted 746,909 satellite applications lodged with the ITU before adding SpaceX’s application.
SpaceX argues that moving computation to space provides an 'unlimited' solar energy source and radiative cooling that eliminates the environmental footprint and grid bottlenecks of ground-based data centers.
SpaceX’s proposed satellites would be spaced roughly 50 kilometers apart from their nearest neighbor within each orbital shell.
SpaceX filed an application with the FCC for 1,000,000 additional orbiting satellites.
Pending FCC approval, SpaceX intends to use its Starship launch vehicle to deploy the initial shells of the data center constellation.
Starshield has 135 operational satellites.
SpaceX will provide Stargaze conjunction data free of charge to many satellite operators within the next few weeks.
SpaceX filed with the FCC to use the new fleet of satellites as orbital computing and data centers to power AI applications.
SpaceX has developed a Space Situational Awareness system called Stargaze to reduce satellite collision risk in low Earth orbit.
SpaceX manufactures roughly 85 percent of its components in-house.