SpaceX: 1 Million Satellites For Orbital Data Center [???]
January 31st, 2026Via: PC Magazine:
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.
Related: With ‘Stargaze,’ SpaceX Aims to Prevent Orbital Starlink Satellite Collisions
“From June to November 2025, the satellites performed 148,696 propulsive maneuvers to stay in safe orbits, the company recently told the FCC.”
Seems like near earth space is going to inevitably get very hazardous–timeframe particularly accelerated if we have large space weather events causing some collisions.
Grok:
“Yes, satellite collisions have occurred in space, though confirmed cases involving two intact, sizable satellites are rare. Most fragmentation events in orbit stem from explosions (e.g., residual fuel or batteries), intentional anti-satellite (ASAT) tests, or impacts with smaller debris, but actual hypervelocity collisions between satellites have been documented.The most notable and destructive accidental collision happened on February 10, 2009, when the operational U.S. Iridium 33 communications satellite collided with the defunct Russian Cosmos 2251 military satellite at about 789 km altitude over Siberia. They smashed together at a relative speed of around 11.7 km/s (over 26,000 mph), completely destroying both and generating more than 2,000 trackable debris pieces (plus many smaller untrackable fragments). This remains the first confirmed hypervelocity crash between two intact satellites and one of the worst debris-generating events in orbital history.”