SpaceX reaches 10,000 simultaneous Starlink satellites in orbit following Falcon 9 launch from California

A batch of SpaceX’s 25 Starlink V2 Mini Optimized satellites are shown in low Earth orbit ahead of deployment during the Starlink 17-24 mission on March 16, 2026. Image: SpaceX

Update March 17, 3:10 a.m. EDT (0710 UTC): SpaceX confirms satellite deployment.

SpaceX crossed the threshold of having more than 10,000 Starlink satellites in low Earth orbit simultaneously for the first time. The milestone comes less than seven years after launching its first batch of satellites in May 2019.

Coincidently, the Monday night launch also coincided with the 100th anniversary of Robert Goddard’s launch of the first liquid-propelled rocket, which was fueled by gasoline. A century later, SpaceX’s Monday night launch of a Falcon 9 rocket was the 615th flight of this kerosene-fueled rocket.

Liftoff of the mission that put SpaceX over the 10,000-satellite threshold, dubbed Starlink Group 17-24, happened at 10:19:09 p.m. PDT (1:19:09 a.m. EDT / 0619:09 UTC on Tuesday, Mar. 17).

The Falcon 9 rocket flew on a southerly trajectory upon leaving Space Launch Complex 4 East. This was the 17th orbital launch from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California so far this year.



SpaceX launched the mission using the Falcon 9 first stage booster with the tail number of 1088. This was its 14th flight, following the launches of NASA’s SPHEREx, Transporter-12, two missions for the National Reconnaissance Office and nine previous Starlink missions.

A little more than eight minutes after liftoff, B1088 landed on the drone ship, ‘Of Course I Still Love,’ positioned in the Pacific Ocean. This was the 184th landing on this vessel and the 586th booster landing for SpaceX to date.

The 25 Starlink satellites deployed a little more than an hour after liftoff.

10,000 and counting

The sheer volume of SpaceX’s Starlink constellation puts it in a league of its own. The company has been averaging a launch every 2.3 days in 2026, with 26 out of its 33 Falcon 9 rocket launches this year sending Starlink satellites into orbit.

As of February 13, 2026, SpaceX said its Starlink service had more than 10 million active customers “across 160 countries, territories and many other markets.” In the month since reaching that milestone, it announced the activation of Starlink connectivity in Niue, Kuwait, and the Central African Republic.

Back in October 2025, after SpaceX crossed the threshold of 10,000 Starlink satellites launched to date — it had about 8,600 satellites concurrently in orbit at the time — expert orbital tracker and X-ray astronomer Dr. Jonathan McDowell described reaching that milestone as “truly remarkable.”

“The number of avoidance maneuvers, 10s of thousands of avoidance maneuvers a year that the system is making to avoid running into itself is just so far beyond what anyone was doing in the 2010s, much less earlier,” McDowell said. “I think, whatever your feelings are about SpaceX or the people involved with it, it’s a remarkable technical achievement.”



This year, SpaceX publicly announced its own Space Situational Awareness (SSA) system, which it named ‘Stargaze’. The system uses the multiple star trackers onboard each satellite to help crate a map of objects in low Earth orbit to expedite the process of identifying and avoiding potential collisions.

Spaceflight Now also spoke with Caleb Henry for our story last October. The Director of Research for Quilty Space, a research firm focused on the space industry, pointed to five lenses through which SpaceX was able to establish its dominance among satellite operators.

“Four of them are technological. One of them financial. Financial first. Starlink has been able to raise, or SpaceX has been able to raise significant sums of money,” Henry said. “They easily raised more than any other constellation venture that wasn’t either internally funded, like Amazon, or government funded, like the SDA or perhaps some Chinese constellations. So, having access to billions of dollars in capital really helped. The money along is not the solution. It’s not the reason that they were able to do this and others hadn’t by itself.”

Henry said the technological lenses revolve around SpaceX’s vertical integration of launch, satellites, gateways and user terminals.

“Starlink is building (user terminals) for an order of magnitude, maybe two orders of magnitude above what anyone else is doing,” Henry said. “And that allows them to reach a price point for their equipment that is so low that they basically make the consumer market explode.”

This year, SpaceX is expected to start launching its much larger Starlink Version 3 satellites, using its massive Starship rocket. There’s no public launch date for when that first deployment will happen since the company is still testing out its Starship Version 3 rocket to launch for the first time.

Back in October, Henry said that Quilty forecast as many as eight Starship launches with Starlink satellites during 2026. 

“The V3 version of Starship is supposed to be able to lift 100 metric tons to orbit and we see that as really unlocking the V3 version of the satellite, which is going to be heavier, which is going to have a terabit of capacity, just by far and away more than any other low Earth orbit satellite out there,” Henry said.