A satellite internet constellation is a

constellation A constellation is an area on the celestial sphere in which a group of visible stars forms Asterism (astronomy), a perceived pattern or outline, typically representing an animal, mythological subject, or inanimate object. The first constellati ...

of artificial satellites providing satellite internet service. In particular, the term has come to refer to a new generation of very large constellations (sometimes referred to as megaconstellations ) orbiting in

low Earth orbit A low Earth orbit (LEO) is an geocentric orbit, orbit around Earth with a orbital period, period of 128 minutes or less (making at least 11.25 orbits per day) and an orbital eccentricity, eccentricity less than 0.25. Most of the artificial object ...

(LEO) to provide low-latency, high bandwidth (

broadband In telecommunications, broadband or high speed is the wide-bandwidth (signal processing), bandwidth data transmission that exploits signals at a wide spread of frequencies or several different simultaneous frequencies, and is used in fast Inter ...

) internet service. As of 2020, 63 percent of rural households worldwide lacked internet access due to the infrastructure requirements of underground cables and network towers. Satellite internet constellations offer a low-cost solution for expanding coverage.

History

While more-limited

satellite internet Satellite Internet access is Internet access provided through communication satellites; if it can sustain high speeds, it is termed satellite broadband. Modern consumer grade satellite Internet service is typically provided to individual use ...

services have been available through

geosynchronous A geosynchronous orbit (sometimes abbreviated GSO) is an Earth-centered orbit with an orbital period that matches Earth's rotation on its axis, 23 hours, 56 minutes, and 4 seconds (one sidereal day). The synchronization of rotation and orbital ...

commsats orbiting in

geostationary orbit A geostationary orbit, also referred to as a geosynchronous equatorial orbit''Geostationary orbit'' and ''Geosynchronous (equatorial) orbit'' are used somewhat interchangeably in sources. (GEO), is a circular orbit, circular geosynchronous or ...

for years, these have been of quite limited bandwidth (not broadband), high- latency, and provided at such a relatively high

price A price is the (usually not negative) quantity of payment or compensation expected, required, or given by one party to another in return for goods or services. In some situations, especially when the product is a service rather than a ph ...

that

demand In economics, demand is the quantity of a goods, good that consumers are willing and able to purchase at various prices during a given time. In economics "demand" for a commodity is not the same thing as "desire" for it. It refers to both the desi ...

for the services offered has been quite low. In the 1990s, several LEO satellite internet constellations were proposed and developed, including Celestri (63 satellites) and Teledesic (initially 840, later 288 satellites). These projects were abandoned after the bankruptcy of the

Iridium Iridium is a chemical element; it has the symbol Ir and atomic number 77. This very hard, brittle, silvery-white transition metal of the platinum group, is considered the second-densest naturally occurring metal (after osmium) with a density ...

and Globalstar satellite phone constellations in the early 2000s. In the 2010s, interest in satellite internet constellations reemerged due to the dropping cost of launching to space and the increased demand for broadband internet access. Internet satellite constellations are planned by private companies like OneWeb ( OneWeb constellation),

SpaceX Space Exploration Technologies Corp., commonly referred to as SpaceX, is an America, American space technology company headquartered at the SpaceX Starbase, Starbase development site in Starbase, Texas. Since its founding in 2002, the compa ...

(

Starlink Starlink is a satellite internet constellation operated by Starlink Services, LLC, an international telecommunications provider that is a wholly owned subsidiary of American aerospace company SpaceX, providing coverage to around 130 countries ...

Amazon Amazon most often refers to: * Amazon River, in South America * Amazon rainforest, a rainforest covering most of the Amazon basin * Amazon (company), an American multinational technology company * Amazons, a tribe of female warriors in Greek myth ...

( Project Kuiper),Amazon lays out constellation service goals, deployment and deorbit plans to FCC
Caleb Henry,

SpaceNews ''SpaceNews'' is a print and digital publication that covers business and political news in the space and satellite industry. ''SpaceNews'' provides news, commentary and analysis to an audience of government officials, politicians and executives ...

, 8 July 2019, accessed 19 September 2019.

Samsung Samsung Group (; stylised as SΛMSUNG) is a South Korean Multinational corporation, multinational manufacturing Conglomerate (company), conglomerate headquartered in the Samsung Town office complex in Seoul. The group consists of numerous a ...

and Russia's

Roscosmos The State Corporation for Space Activities "Roscosmos", commonly known simply as Roscosmos (), is a State corporation (Russia), state corporation of the Russian Federation responsible for space science, space flights, List of space agencies, c ...

(Sfera) and China (Hongwan, 2018, or national satellite internet project, 2021). By late 2018, more than 18,000 new satellites had been proposed to be launched and placed in LEO orbits between 2019 and 2025. This is more than ten times as many satellites as the sum of all active satellites in space as of March 2018. More recent proposals by 2020 could bring that number to over 100,000. A year after the start of fielding the first satellite internet constellation—Starlink which began launching in late 2019 and began beta test of the network in late 2020; OneWeb began satellite deployment in 1H2020—the competitive disruption to established satellite company business models began to be better understood. In early 2021, the three largest European satellite operators SES,

Eutelsat Eutelsat S.A. is a French satellite operator. Providing coverage over the entire European continent, the Middle East, Africa, Asia and the Americas, it has been the world's third-largest satellite operator in terms of revenues. Its subsidiary E ...

, and Hispasat—which had until that time eschewed developing and fielding a broadband satellite internet constellation with private funds—informed the

European Commission The European Commission (EC) is the primary Executive (government), executive arm of the European Union (EU). It operates as a cabinet government, with a number of European Commissioner, members of the Commission (directorial system, informall ...

that they would be willing to invest in the development of such a project if the

European Union The European Union (EU) is a supranational union, supranational political union, political and economic union of Member state of the European Union, member states that are Geography of the European Union, located primarily in Europe. The u ...

were to invest government funds in the effort as well. All three companies had formerly focused on the provision of communication services from GEO and MEO orbits, while the newer satellite internet providers have been fielding their constellations exclusively in LEO. In March 2025, the largest of the three operators, SES entered into a partnership with satellite direct-to-device (D2D) provider, Lynk Global to route traffic between Lynk's LEO constellation and SES’s MEO satellites and gateways to enable secure real-time data delivery and reduce requirements for ground infrastructure. In 2018, the Russian government established the

Sfera SFera is a science fiction society from Zagreb, Croatia. It was founded in 1976, thus marking the beginnings of organized science fiction fandom in the region. SFera is the official organizer of SFeraKon, an annual Croatian science fiction conve ...

(''Sphere'') constellation program, to consist of 162 satellites, providing broadband internet connectivity, message relay, video broadcast, and remote sensing services. In October 2022, a demonstrator satellite called Skif-D technology was launched.

Design

Proposed systems vary greatly in the number of satellites, the types of orbits and the telecommunication architecture (in particular the presence or absence of inter-satellite links). System designs have been analyzed using statistical methods and simulations to estimate the total throughput. Particularly challenging is the dynamic nature of the network, as LEO satellites typically pass over a given location in less than 10 minutes.

Potential

For continental distances (greater than about 3,000 km), LEO satellite internet networks are expected to be able to provide lower latency than optical fiber links. This is expected to hold even without inter-satellite links, using only ground station relays. The new networks are said to be able to "potentially compete with today's ISPs in many settings".

Issues and criticism

Critics have objected against the increased

light pollution Light pollution is the presence of any unwanted, inappropriate, or excessive artificial Visible spectrum, lighting. In a descriptive sense, the term ''light pollution'' refers to the effects of any poorly implemented lighting sources, during the ...

for

astronomy Astronomy is a natural science that studies celestial objects and the phenomena that occur in the cosmos. It uses mathematics, physics, and chemistry in order to explain their origin and their overall evolution. Objects of interest includ ...

, the increased possibility satellite collisions resulting in

space debris Space debris (also known as space junk, space pollution, space waste, space trash, space garbage, or cosmic debris) are defunct human-made objects in spaceprincipally in Earth orbitwhich no longer serve a useful function. These include dere ...

and, more generally, a lack of end-of-life cleanup for the increasing number of satellites that would become space debris. Astronomers have studied the potential effects increased satellite usage in

Low Earth Orbit A low Earth orbit (LEO) is an geocentric orbit, orbit around Earth with a orbital period, period of 128 minutes or less (making at least 11.25 orbits per day) and an orbital eccentricity, eccentricity less than 0.25. Most of the artificial object ...

would have on

Very Large Telescope The Very Large Telescope (VLT) is an astronomical facility operated since 1998 by the European Southern Observatory, located on Cerro Paranal in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile. It consists of four individual telescopes, each equipped with ...

that use ultra-wide imaging exposures, such as the 8.4-meter Simonyi Survey Telescope used in the Legacy Survey of Space and Time project at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. They found that 30 to 40% of exposures could be compromised during the first and last hours of the night. A study found that twilight observations are particularly affected by SC and that the fraction of streaked images taken during twilight has increased from less than 0.5% in late 2019 to 18% in August 2021 due to SpaceX Starlink Satellites. Astronomers have also voiced concern over the impact satellite internet constellations will have on

radio astronomy Radio astronomy is a subfield of astronomy that studies Astronomical object, celestial objects using radio waves. It started in 1933, when Karl Jansky at Bell Telephone Laboratories reported radiation coming from the Milky Way. Subsequent observat ...

. Additional research is needed to determine impact of (inter alia) light pollution on various locations, communities, indigenous peoples, and other forms of observation.

Mitigation in astronomy

A report from the SATCON1 workshop in 2020 concluded that the effects of large satellite constellations can severely affect some astronomical research efforts and lists six ways to mitigate harm to astronomy. In 2022, the

IAU The International Astronomical Union (IAU; , UAI) is an international non-governmental organization (INGO) with the objective of advancing astronomy in all aspects, including promoting astronomical research, outreach, education, and developmen ...

announced the ''Centre for the Protection of the Dark and Quiet Sky from Satellite Constellation Interference'' to coordinate or aggregate measures to mitigate such detrimental effects. The AAS is maintaining a

living document A living document, also known as an evergreen document or dynamic document, is a document that is continually edited and updated. An example of a living document is an article in Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia that permits anyone to freely edi ...

that tracks recent progress in the field.

Space governance

UN Guidelines and ISO standard 24113 on space debris mitigation "encourages" organizations to voluntarily: * Limit debris released during normal operations * Minimize the potential for on-orbit break-ups * Post-mission disposal * Prevention of on-orbit collisions A study suggests policies could help achieve the goal of debris mitigation and space

sustainability Sustainability is a social goal for people to co-exist on Earth over a long period of time. Definitions of this term are disputed and have varied with literature, context, and time. Sustainability usually has three dimensions (or pillars): env ...

. A team of scientists outlined rationale for governance that regulates the current free externalization of true costs and risks, treating orbital space around the Earth as an "additional ecosystem" or a

common Common may refer to: As an Irish surname, it is anglicised from Irish Gaelic surname Ó Comáin. Places * Common, a townland in County Tyrone, Northern Ireland * Boston Common, a central public park in Boston, Massachusetts * Cambridge Com ...

"part of the human environment" which should be subject to the same concerns and

regulations Regulation is the management of complex systems according to a set of rules and trends. In systems theory, these types of rules exist in various fields of biology and society, but the term has slightly different meanings according to context. Fo ...

like e.g. oceans on Earth. The study concludes that it needs "new policies, rules and regulations at national and international level". As of 2022, global space activity is not sufficiently shaped by any international entity, and therefore "there is no common set of rules that govern global space activity and no mechanisms to ensure the proper disposal of hardware at the completion of space missions. Nor is there any coordinated effort to clean up the decades of space debris already accumulated in orbit."

Federation of Cross-Orbit Satellite Networks

There exist many satellite operators at LEO, MEO, and GEO. Similar to the Internet, which is a network of networks, satellite networks of different operators can also form federated networks of satellite networks.

Constellations

Operational

* Globalstar — an operational constellation of 24 low Earth orbiting (LEO) satellites for satellite phone and low-speed data communications, covering most of the world's landmass. The launch of the second-generation constellation was completed on February 6, 2013 *

— an operational constellation of 66 cross-linked satellites in a

polar orbit A polar orbit is one in which a satellite passes above or nearly above both poles of the body being orbited (usually a planet such as the Earth, but possibly another body such as the Moon or Sun) on each revolution. It has an inclination of abo ...

, used to provide satellite phone and low-speed data services over the entire surface of Earth. Iridium NEXT, a second-generation constellation of the communications satellites, was completed on January 11, 2019 * Orbcomm — an operational constellation used to provide global asset monitoring and messaging services from its constellation of 29 LEO communications satellites orbiting at 775 km *

— a satellite constellation development project to provide high-speed Internet underway by

to deploy nearly 12,000 satellites in multiple orbital shells by the mid-2020s * Lynk Global — a satellite-to-mobile-phone satellite constellation with the objective of coverage to traditional low-cost mobile devices * Viasat, Inc. — a current broadband satellite provider providing fixed, ground mobile, and airborne antennas * OneWeb constellation — in 2023 merged with

, 648-satellite network was planned for completion by late 2022 * Project Kuiper — Amazon's constellation will consist of 3,236 satellites operating in three orbital shells *

O3b mPOWER O3b mPOWER is a communications satellite system owned and operated by SES. The system uses high-throughput and low- latency satellites in a medium Earth orbit (MEO), along with ground infrastructure and intelligent software, to provide multip ...

- provides coverage to most of the globe under a service launched in 2024. Satellites built by

Boeing The Boeing Company, or simply Boeing (), is an American multinational corporation that designs, manufactures, and sells airplanes, rotorcraft, rockets, satellites, and missiles worldwide. The company also provides leasing and product support s ...

. * China State Owned Constellation (

Chinasat ChinaSat () is the brand name of communications satellites operated by China Satellite Communications. History In 2007, a joint venture China Direct Broadcast Satellite was formed to run the brand ChinaSat. It was a joint venture of state ...

) — an operational satellite internet constellation owned by the

government of China The government of the People's Republic of China is based on a system of people's congress within the parameters of a unitary communist state, in which the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) enacts its policies through people's congresses. ...

. * AST SpaceMobile — a satellite-to-mobile-phone constellation to provide 5G services around the world to existing unmodified mobile phones * G60/Qianfan — a Chinese megaconstellation project developed by Shanghai Spacecom Satellite Technology (SSST) to deploy 14,000 satellites by 2030. The first stage consists of 1,296 satellites to provide global coverage; 648 of these are to be launched by the end of 2025 to provide regional network coverage. The first launch was on August 6, 2024., second batch of satellites were launched on 15 October 2024. * Guowang — a Chinese megaconstellation project created by SatNet, a firm backed by the

CAST Cast may refer to: Music * Cast (band), an English alternative rock band * Cast (Mexican band), a progressive Mexican rock band * The Cast, a Scottish musical duo: Mairi Campbell and Dave Francis * ''Cast'', a 2012 album by Trespassers William ...

. it plans to be constituted of over 13,000 satellites by the project's end.

Planned

— a satellite constellation project of the Russian Federation, with plans for up to 640 satellites. Test launch on October 23, 2022. * Infrastructure for Resilience, Interconnectivity and Security by Satellite (IRIS²) — planned multi-orbit satellite internet constellation to be deployed by the

by 2027. * Lightspeed - Broadband constellation by

Telesat Telesat, formerly Telesat Canada, is a Canadian satellite communications company (law), company founded on May 2, 1969. The company is headquartered in Ottawa. History Founding and privatization (1969-2005) Telesat began in 1969 as Telesat C ...

, to be deployed starting in 2026. * Korean Positioning System (KPS) – It will consist of a total of eight satellites, the first of which is scheduled to be launched in 2027.

Defunct

* Teledesic — a former (1990s) venture to accomplish broadband satellite internet services

References

{{Satellite constellations *

Spaceflight