Starcloud files plans for 88,000-satellite constellation

WASHINGTON — An orbital data center startup is seeking approval from the Federal Communications Commission for a constellation of as many as 88,000 satellites.

The FCC accepted for filing March 13 an application by Starcloud, a company based in Redmond, Washington, to operate as many as 88,000 satellites in a range of low Earth orbits to serve as orbital data centers for artificial intelligence and other applications.

“Starcloud is designing its satellite system to accommodate the explosive growth of datacenter demands driven by AI, which is already encountering severe roadblocks to efforts to scale on the ground,” the company wrote in its filing. “By avoiding the constraints of terrestrial deployment, space datacenters will be the most cost-effective and scalable way to deliver compute this decade.”

The filing provides few details about the satellites themselves, such as their size and mass. The satellites will operate in “a select set of narrow orbital shells” up to 50 kilometers thick at altitudes between 600 and 850 kilometers. Those satellites will be in dusk-dawn sun-synchronous orbits to enable “near-continuous power generation” from the sun.

A constellation of 88,000 satellites would be far larger than anything in service today. SpaceX’s Starlink, the largest constellation, has about 10,000 satellites in orbit. However, the Starcloud proposal is far smaller than SpaceX’s proposal, filed with the FCC at the end of January, to develop a constellation of up to one million orbital data center satellites.

Like the SpaceX system, the Starcloud constellation would rely on optical intersatellite data links with broadband systems such as Starlink, Amazon’s Project Kuiper and Blue Origin’s Tera Wave for most communications. The FCC filing seeks authorization for some Ka-band spectrum for telemetry, tracking and control communications with the Starcloud satellites. Those communications, the company said, would be conducted on a non-interference basis.

While Starcloud did not disclose details about the satellites, it said it “takes seriously the safe and sustainable use of these soon-to-be highly utilized orbits.” The company said it would follow many best practices for safe satellite operations, including coordination with other operators and deploying satellites in lower orbits for initial checkouts before raising them to their operational altitudes, ensuring that a malfunctioning satellite quickly reenters.

The company added that its satellites are “designed for full demisability,” meaning they would burn up entirely on reentry with no debris reaching the ground.

“Starcloud will also work closely with the astronomy community to protect essential observations, including implementing established brightness mitigation measures,” it added.

Starcloud, previously known as Lumen Orbit, has deployed one small satellite to date. Starcloud-1 was placed in orbit in November on a SpaceX rideshare mission. The 60-kilogram satellite is the first to run an Nvidia H100 processor in orbit, which it used to run a version of Google’s Gemini AI model.

The company says on its website it is pursuing its first commercial spacecraft, Starcloud-2, scheduled to launch in 2027 into sun-synchronous orbit. The spacecraft will feature a cluster of processors and “proprietary thermal and power systems in a smallsat form factor.”

The company also has plans for constellations called Starcloud-3 and Starcloud-4. The latter would appear to involve massive satellites deployed on SpaceX Starship vehicles. According to a video on its website, a Starcloud-4 satellite would have arrays four kilometers on a side to support a five-gigawatt data center.