LOS ANGELES, July 21 — Starlink, the low Earth orbit broadband constellation operated by SpaceX’s wholly owned subsidiary Starlink Services LLC, has quietly become the company’s largest business segment. By the end of 2025, the division generated $11.4 billion in revenue and $4.4 billion in operating income — figures that would have seemed fanciful when the project was publicly announced in January 2015 from a new satellite development facility in Redmond, Washington. Under the hood, the constellation now comprises approximately 10,413 satellites, of which 10,397 are operational.
That makes Starlink responsible for about 75% of all active maneuverable satellites in Earth orbit — a technical reality that has begun to draw scrutiny from astronomers and orbital traffic managers alike. The service had more than 12 million subscribers as of June 2026, spread across roughly 160 countries and territories.
From filing to fleet
The path to that scale was not straightforward. The original filing with the International Telecommunication Union was made in 2014 through the Norwegian Communications Authority under the name STEAM, after an earlier collaboration with entrepreneur Greg Wyler on a similar project called WorldVu fell through. SpaceX began launching its operational satellites in 2019.
In May 2018, the company estimated that designing, building and deploying the constellation would cost at least $10 billion. The name Starlink itself has an unusual origin.
According to the source material, it was inspired by the 2012 novel The Fault in Our Stars and subsequently trademarked in the United States. As ever with Elon Musk’s ventures, the detail that matters is the long game: during the 2015 announcement event, Musk stated that the positive cash flow from Starlink would be necessary to fund SpaceX’s plans for Mars colonization. SpaceX also has long-term plans to develop a version of the satellite communication system to serve Mars itself.
Military use and orbital concerns
Beyond civilian broadband and in-flight internet for numerous airlines, Starlink is used for government and military communications — most notably during the Russo-Ukrainian war. The constellation’s sheer size has prompted discussions about its effects on astronomy and on orbital congestion. The wry observation one might make is that a project conceived to fund a Mars settlement is now reshaping the orbital environment around Earth in ways its critics argue demand more attention.
The technical reality is that Starlink now dominates the active satellite population, and that dominance will only grow as more users come online. For the moment, the business case is proven: revenue from the constellation has outpaced SpaceX’s launch business, and the subscriber base continues to expand across the 160-odd countries where the service is available.
What to watch next
The detail that matters in the coming months is whether Starlink can maintain its growth trajectory while managing the regulatory and operational pressures that come with being, by a wide margin, the largest satellite operator in history. The Mars-colony funding thesis remains intact, but the orbital congestion debate is unlikely to fade.
Sources
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