March 17, 2026

5 min read

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SpaceX now has more than 10,000 Starlink satellites in orbit

Once unfathomable, the milestone of a single company having 10,000 satellites operating overhead signals that the era of mega constellations is here to stay

By Jonathan O'Callaghan edited by Lee Billings

Amanda Montañez

For most of the space age, our presence in Earth orbit has been relatively modest. Until the beginning of the 21st century, only a few hundred satellites operated around Earth at any one time, and the number grew to a few thousand by the 2010s. But in 2019 everything changed. That was the year one company—SpaceX—launched the first satellites for its Starlink Internet constellation. SpaceX has been relentlessly hurling Starlink satellites into orbit ever since and just hit a huge milestone that cements this daunting new era.

As of today, more than 10,000 active Starlink satellites are in space, constituting about two thirds of all satellites that are currently in orbit. That’s a number that would have seemed unbelievable just a decade ago—and a rate of growth that experts are still struggling to comprehend. “Starlink has changed our relationship with space,” says Hugh Lewis, a space debris expert at the University of Birmingham in England. “The character of the night sky is no longer the same as it once was, and I’m not sure it will ever be again.”

At 1:19 A.M. EDT on Tuesday, March 17, a Falcon 9 rocket launched from Space Launch Complex 4 East at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California with 25 Starlink satellites onboard. That takes SpaceX’s total number of Starlink satellites in orbit to 10,020, according to statistics compiled by Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist who tracks global space launches. The company has only now reached that five-figure operational number: it has launched 11,529 Starlink satellites in total since May 2019, but some of these have been replacements for defunct, deorbited spacecraft.

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The scale of Starlink is difficult to overstate. What began as a speculative project to beam the Internet to Earth from space has become much more. Around the world, Starlink is utilized by 10 million users and counting, from rural communities to Ukrainian battlefields to remote Amazonian tribes. That gives SpaceX, and its CEO Elon Musk, unprecedented geopolitical power: the ability to switch the Internet on and off for entire regions at a whim.

And that power hasn’t gone unnoticed by competitors seeking to rival Starlink’s dominance. In the U.S. the Jeff Bezos–backed Amazon Leo constellation has launched about 200 of more than 7,500 planned satellites. In China the government-backed Qianfan and Guowang constellations are aiming for 15,000 and 13,000 satellites, respectively. “If there are more players in the market aside from SpaceX, this monopoly they have on satellite Internet is definitely going to degrade,” says Mustafa Bilal, a researcher at the Center for Aerospace & Security Studies (CASS) in Islamabad, Pakistan.

Amanda Montañez; Source: Jonathan’s Space Pages (data), with additional consulting by Jonathan McDowell

For the time being, however, Starlink reigns supreme, representing its status as a marvel of SpaceX’s world-leading logistics, manufacturing and launching capabilities. The company’s reusable Falcon 9 rocket, now with more than 600 launches to its name, has given SpaceX the means to deploy Starlink at extraordinary speed, with up to 60 satellites lofted into orbit per launch. In contrast, the next largest constellation in space, Europe’s OneWeb, numbers a paltry 654 satellites.

Starlink dominates the altitudes at which it operates: around 480 to 550 kilometers (300 to 340 miles) above Earth. Around the clock, the satellites autonomously dodge one another—and other satellites as well—to avoid collisions that could produce thousands of pieces of space debris. If such satellites did collide, this could trigger a cascade of collisions that could render regions of Earth orbit temporarily unusable in a scenario called the Kessler syndrome.

In December 2025 SpaceX submitted a report to the Federal Communications Commission that, coupled with a prior report that it submitted last June, showed its Starlink constellation performed about 300,000 collision avoidance maneuvers in 2025 alone. That translates to nearly 40 maneuvers per satellite over 12 months. The number is astonishing, considering that, pre-Starlink, a given satellite might perform only a handful of avoidance maneuvers each year.

So far, so good; despite the astro