SpaceX is no longer merely dominant in space. It has built something closer to a private monopoly on low-Earth orbit – and its listing prospectus, filed in the US on Wednesday, lays out plans to entrench that position by orders of magnitude.
Three out of every four active manoeuvrable satellites in orbit are now SpaceX’s. So are roughly two-thirds of all operational satellites of any kind. The Elon Musk-controlled company has launched some 80% of all mass to orbit globally every year since 2023.
The S-1 registration statement, in which SpaceX seeks to list on the Nasdaq and Nasdaq Texas exchanges under the ticker “SPCX”, discloses that the company operated 9 600 Starlink broadband and mobile satellites in low-Earth orbit as of 31 March 2026.
Meanwhile, the head of the US Federal Aviation Administration confirmed that SpaceX is targeting 10 000 rocket launches a year within five years – more than 50 times the 170 launches it completed in 2025, or one every 53 minutes on average. Musk has separately said the company wants to put 10 000 communications satellites a year into orbit, and is planning a constellation of up to a million spacecraft to harness solar power for artificial intelligence data centres in space.
The prospectus also reveals that in 2025, Starlink satellites carried out more than a thousand automated collision-avoidance manoeuvres per day, with SpaceX pointing to the figure as evidence of its operational sophistication.
FAA administrator Bryan Bedford told reporters in Arlington, Virginia on Wednesday that SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell had outlined the company’s “five-year vision to get to 10 000 launches a year”, according to Reuters. SpaceX completed 170 launches in 2025, deploying around 2 500 satellites.
Reliability
Bedford said the FAA would need to see “a lot more reliability” before approving such an expansion. He said the meeting with Shotwell “was to go through the constraints that we see and what can we do, planning-wise now, to put ourselves in a position to accommodate that type of a stretch goal”. The conversation, he said, had been “very frank” and “we’re going to have to push ourselves, they’re going to have to push their reliability”.
In a separate Forbes video interview that aired this week, Musk said SpaceX eventually wants to launch 10 000 communications satellites per year, without specifying a timeframe. In January 2026, SpaceX disclosed plans for a constellation of one million satellites designed to harness solar power to run AI data centres in orbit – an ambition reiterated in the IPO prospectus, which targets initial deployment of the first of these satellites by 2028.
“Deployment of 100GW/year via satellites carrying over 100kW of compute power per metric ton will require thousands of launches per year and the transport of approximately one million metric tons to orbit annually,” the prospectus states.
Read: SpaceX’s record-setting IPO is here
The IPO filing makes clear how far ahead SpaceX is of every credible competitor:
- Eutelsat-owned OneWeb operates around 650 satellites with no near-term path to significant expansion;
- The Amazon Leo constellation remains in the low hundreds and is running behind its US Federal Communications Commission deployment deadlines; and
- China’s two flagship projects – the state-owned Guowang constellation, planned at 13 000 satellites, and the Shanghai-backed Qianfan or “Thousand Sails” constellation, planned at 14 000 to 15 000 – had around 130 and 126 satellites in orbit respectively as of April 2026, after a seven-month deployment pause caused by tumbling satellites and upper-stage debris concerns.
SpaceX, by contrast, is preparing to begin deploying its next-generation V3 Starlink satellites on Starship in the second half of 2026. The prospectus indicates each V3 satellite will deliver 1Tbit/s of downlink capacity, with as many as 60 satellites carried per Starship launch – a roughly 20-fold increase in deployed capacity per launch over Falcon 9. – © 2026 NewsCentral Media
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