Russia's attempt to replicate SpaceX's Starlink satellite network seems to be moving as slowly as the front lines in eastern Ukraine.
The Rassvet program, often billed as Russia's answer to Starlink, started launching its first operational satellites earlier this year. Two launches, one in March and a second in July, have delivered 32 Rassvet satellites to low-Earth orbit, some 10 percent of the roughly 300 Rassvet spacecraft Russia aims to put into orbit by the end of next year to provide connectivity for military and civilian users. The company in charge of Rassvet, Bureau 1440, wants to deploy 924 satellites by 2035.
But none of the 32 satellites launched so far have reached the 500-mile (800-kilometer) orbit they were designed to operate in. The rockets that launched the first two batches of Rassvets released the satellites much closer to Earth, and the satellites were expected to use their own plasma engines to raise their orbits over the next few months.
SpaceX made Florida's Space Coast home to the world's busiest spaceport for a decade, but that will change this year. The company is significantly cutting the number of launches from Florida until Starship arrives, a senior SpaceX official confirmed Tuesday.
The Falcon 9 rocket has been SpaceX's workhorse, routinely launching batches of satellites for the company's Starlink network, primarily from launch pads at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. There were 165 Falcon 9 launches last year—about three flights per week—and about 75 percent of them carried Starlink satellites.
This year is different. SpaceX has launched more missions from its West Coast launch pad at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California since January, and this trend will amplify for the rest of the year.
Aside from global access to cat videos, the presence of thousands of Starlink broadband internet access satellites in LEO has a very pleasant side effect for atmospheric researchers. Starlink publicly publishes near-real-time ephemeris data on its individual satellites. From this data you can deduce many details about the atmosphere at that altitude, including its density at specific altitudes at specific times, information which otherwise would be very hard to gather. Recently, this allowed [Mamoru Yamamoto] to determine the density of the thermosphere using tomography.
In a similar 2025 paper by [Zhuoliang Ou] et al. as published in Remote Sensing, this same data source was used to investigate details of the thermosphere. With Starlink publishing this data since 2021, this provides an invaluable dataset for studying this outermost part of the atmosphere.
Commencing just before the generally recognized transition into ‘space’ at 100 km altitude and below the Earth’s exosphere, the thermosphere‘s thickness fluctuates due to factors like solar irradiation and, with it, the exact altitude at which the exosphere begins. Generally, though, it is well above 600 km altitude. This places Starlink satellites as well as both active space stations (ISS and Tiangong) in the thermosphere.
[Zuholiang Ou] et al. established that the Starlink data matches well with that from a dedicated research satellite like SWARM-B, thus making it a useful source of scientific data.
The innovation in [Yamamoto-san]’s paper is that instead of using the typical two-line element (TLE) set, a more comprehensive tomographic approach was used, which essentially uses more data for a larger reconstruction, with the resolution claimed to be about on par with that of the SWARM satellites. This implies that although these Starlink satellites were never designed to be more than data relays, they may have accidentally become the biggest development in thermospheric research in a long time.
John Cook studies the 2009 Puget Sound Tech Universe map while recording this week’s GeekWire Podcast, with WTIA’s 2026 Washington Tech Universe map on the table behind him. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop)
This week on the GeekWire podcast: SpaceX reports its first quarter as a public company, and Elon Musk says Starlink could deliver a majority of the world’s internet within a decade, leveraging production facilities in Redmond. Musk also explains the company’s data center ambitions, calling terrestrial infrastructure a trivial problem next to reusable rockets.
Plus: we bring two Washington tech universe posters into the studio, 17 years apart. The 2009 original turns up gems including Boeing’s unlikely connection to Classmates.com, the 1990s forerunner to Facebook. It also brings back memories of Teledesic, the Craig McCaw venture backed by Bill Gates that tried to beam internet from space decades before Starlink.
Finally, the GeekWire Trivia Challenge returns with a timely question about Google’s origins.
A Falcon 9 rocket arcs into the night sky during a February 2023 launch. Most of SpaceX’s launches carry Starlink satellites built at the company’s factory in Redmond, Wash. (SpaceX Photo, licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0)
The satellites rolling off the line in Redmond, Wash., are paying for Elon Musk’s AI ambitions — and he says the company’s satellite internet business is only getting started.
SpaceX’s Starlink connectivity division posted $1.7 billion in operating income for the second quarter, maintaining its status as the company’s only profitable business, according to numbers released Tuesday afternoon as part of its inaugural earnings report as a public company.
The AI division, built around the Grok model and the X social media and technology platform, lost $1.3 billion while spending $15.8 billion on capital projects. That capital spending amounted to more than three times Starlink’s quarterly revenue of $4.3 billion (up 66%).
Musk, the company’s founder and CEO, used the first SpaceX earnings call to make the case that investors are badly underestimating Starlink.
He said a new generation of satellites could increase Starlink revenue tenfold, and the network could deliver “a majority of the world’s internet” in less than 10 years. Musk said AI and robots will drive demand for bandwidth far beyond anything people generate on their own.
“I think Starlink is the only thing that can actually service that bandwidth,” he said.
Amazon is getting in the race, building its own satellite internet network at a factory in nearby Kirkland, Wash. Its Leo constellation has “close to 400 satellites in orbit, enough to begin initial satellite internet service this year,” CEO Andy Jassy told analysts last week.
Overall, SpaceX topped Wall Street expectations with revenue of $7.8 billion for the quarter, up 92% from $4.1 billion a year earlier. It also narrowed its net loss to $541 million from $1 billion.
SpaceX shares closed at $125.33, up 9.4% on the day, then fell nearly 5% in after-hours trading following the report, apparently on concerns about the company’s capital spending.
SpaceX builds its Starlink satellites at a Seattle-area factory that produced about 70 a week from December 2025 to April 2026, according to the company’s IPO filing. The output has put roughly 9,600 Starlink satellites in orbit, about 75% of all active maneuverable satellites circling the planet.
For the second quarter, SpaceX reported 12 million Starlink subscribers, double the number a year earlier and an increase of 1.7 million from the first quarter. The revenue increase in the Starlink division (officially known as “Connectivity”) was driven by a 108% jump in enterprise and government business, which now accounts for more than 40% of the segment’s sales.
The subscriber total was just under the 12.19 million Wall Street had projected, but the segment’s revenue exceeded expectations by about $460 million, more than any other part of the company.
Starlink now brings in $66 a month per subscriber, down from $85 a year ago as it expands overseas and adds cheaper plans. The good news for SpaceX: the figure stopped falling, holding flat from the first quarter, despite the company’s warning to IPO investors that it would keep sliding.
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