China has applied to launch 200,000 satellites, but what are they for?

China has applied to launch nearly 200,000 satellites into Earth orbit, but the move may be an attempt at merely reserving orbital space rather than a genuine effort to build the largest mega-constellation in existence.

On December 29, the newly formed Institute of Radio Spectrum Utilisation and Technological Innovation in China filed proposals for two satellite constellations with the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), a United Nations body that allocates spectrum in space.

The constellations, which are called CTC-1 and CTC-2 and backed by the Chinese government, would each contain 96,714 satellites spread over an eye-watering 3660 orbits. For comparison, there are 14,300 active satellites in orbit today, about 9400 of which are SpaceX Starlink satellites operating in a handful of orbits, which beam internet connections to the ground. SpaceX has filed to launch 42,000 satellites with the ITU.

Victoria Samson at the Secure World Foundation, a US non-profit, says the Chinese filing might be a land grab of sorts. “It is possible they’re just trying to create some space for later on,” she says. “It is also possible that maybe they’re planning on something that big.”

Staking this claim with the ITU means that other satellite operators filing to launch into the same orbits must demonstrate to the ITU that they will not interfere with their operations. Under ITU rules, at least one satellite must be launched seven years after China’s initial filing, with another seven years then allowed to finish launching all the proposed satellites.

“If you file ahead of someone else, if you meet your deadlines, those other operators should not interfere with you,” says Tim Farrar, a satellite communications consultant in the US, adding that China’s large filing for so many different orbits might signal some uncertainty in the structure of this constellation. “It gives them freedom of choice of what they want to do,” he says. “There’s very little penalty to doing it this way.”

But even if the application is genuine, achieving it seems to be almost impossible. China launched 92 rockets in 2025, a record for the nation, but would need to launch more than 500 satellites a week to deploy 200,000 in seven years, requiring hundreds, if not thousands, of launches a year.

This wouldn’t be the first attempt at a land grab in space. In 2021, Rwanda filed for a constellation of 327,000 satellites with the ITU into 27 orbits. However, the filing hasn’t hampered the activity of Starlink and other operators. “People have not really changed what they’re doing,” says Farrar. “These Rwandan satellites don’t seem likely to be built in any significant quantity.”

But China’s application does highlight the growing competition in the mega-constellation field, particularly for space internet companies that aim to capture a potential market of tens or hundreds of millions of people and control the world’s flow of information. Currently, everyone is playing catch-up to compete with SpaceX. Amazon’s Project Leo in the US, formerly called Project Kuiper, has launched about 200 satellites of a planned 3236, while two major state-backed Chinese constellations called Qianfan and Guowang have launched a few hundred out of thousands of planned satellites.

“Fifteen years ago, the idea of having 1000 satellites in one constellation was crazy,” says Samson. “Now here we are with 9000-plus with Starlink.”

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