This achievement means that Elon Musk, the company’s president, now controls two-thirds of all active satellites, according to data from Celestrack, a non-profit organization specializing in satellite tracking.

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As of October 20, 8,562 of the 12,955 active satellites in low Earth orbit – just over 66% – have become part of the Starlink constellation. While an additional 1,500 Starlink satellites are either inactive or no longer in orbit.

SpaceX’s dominance has raised concerns about the amount of influence possessed by the richest person in the world through his control over the Starlink network.

In 2023, Musk claimed to have “ real-time global economic data than anyone else ever” through his control of Tesla, SpaceX and X.

This broad dominance gives Elon Musk unprecedented influence in the field of global communications, while his closest competitor, OneWeb, still owns only 651 satellites, while several Chinese projects aim to have than 10,000 satellites orbiting the Earth by the 2030s.

Although SpaceX plans to expand the network to 42,000 satellites, it has only obtained a license to launch 12,000 satellites so far.

This expansion comes at a potential environmental cost. The Starlink satellites, which broadcast high-speed Internet to Earth, were designed to operate for approximately five years, before undertaking a controlled combustion process of engines to re-enter the atmosphere and burn up completely.

Videos showing Starlink debris burning in the night sky have spread across social media in recent weeks, with astronomer Jonathan McDowell recording an average landing of two SpaceX satellites per day in 2025.

Dr. McDowell, who works at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in the United States, said that this number will rise to about five satellites per day as SpaceX continues to expand its constellation.

While these landings do not pose a danger to people on the ground, Dr. McDowell warned that pollutants resulting from combustion could cause potential damage to the atmosphere and contribute to global warming.

Source: Independent