The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has filed to reserve orbital slots and radio spectrum for constellations of more than 200,000 satellites, a move seen as an attempt to slow advances in satellite communications from the United States and its partners.
The massive filing amounts to four times more satellites than the 50,000 planned by dominant orbital operator SpaceX. Questions are being raised within the industry about whether Chinese firms can manufacture and operate these megaconstellations within the seven-year deployment window required by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), the United Nations agency that facilitates global connectivity.
The CCP submitted its filing in December 2025, at the end of a calendar year in which it fell far short of goals it set for catching up with SpaceX. The U.S. company operates more than 11,000 Starlink satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO) to provide broadband internet service across the world, particularly in remote areas. LEO satellites are seen as essential for driverless cars, drone warfare and military surveillance, among other uses.
The CCP’s two biggest networks deployed less than 1 percent of the satellites they had planned, the New York Times reported in July 2025. The first megaconstellation, Qianfan, was scheduled to have about 650 satellites in space by the end of 2025, the newspaper reported. As of February 20, 2026, there were only 108 and some of them had failed, according to the Space-track.org catalog maintained by the U.S. Space Force. The other megaconstellation, Guowang, is picking up its slow pace but had only 145 satellites on orbit of the 13,000 planned in the next decade.
SpaceX, meantime, expands its lead every month. The company launched 21 Starlink missions in the first two months of 2026 alone, each carrying about 25 satellites, according to its website.
The CCP submitted two ITU filings simultaneously, each covering 96,714 satellites in 3,660 orbital planes, spacenews.com reported January 26. This represents one of the largest constellation filings ever made, highlighting growing competition over orbital and spectrum resources.
The ITU submission, whether the CCP can realistically follow through on it, amounts to a kind of orbital “squatting,” according to a February 19 analysis by industry news website satnews.com. The U.N. agency regulates deployments, in part, to ensure that radio emissions from LEO satellites don’t cause unacceptable interference to higher-priority satellites in higher-altitude geostationary orbit. The filings do not constitute authorization of satellites.
Other nations have employed the squatting tactic, but the U.S. government steers clear of it in the interest of orbital sustainability and to avoid competition with its commercial providers, according to satnews.com. Developing nations in Africa and elsewhere have raised alarms about major spacefaring nations gobbling up the spectrum and are working to occupy their own slots within the seven-year ITU deadline.
The CCP filing creates so-called “ghost constellations,” but they force a very real response from other systems like Starlink and the up-and-coming Amazon Kuiper constellation. They must plan around these on-paper systems, satnews.com noted, slowing their deployments and “potentially throttling their network performance.” Space-track.org listed 11,048 Starlink satellites as of February 20 and 182 for Kuiper.