Name: Why Companies Are Racing to Put Satellites in Low Earth Orbit
Uploaded: 2026-05-11T15:45:00Z
Duration: 3 min 59 s
Description: Investors expect the market for low Earth orbit satellites to grow to about $108 billion by 2035. WSJ's Micah Maidenberg explains what's at stake for the corporate fight over LEO, and whether Amazon and others can put a dent in SpaceX's dominance there.

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Investors expect the market for low Earth orbit satellites to grow to about $108 billion by 2035. WSJ's Micah Maidenberg explains what's at stake for the corporate fight over LEO, and whether Amazon and others can put a dent in SpaceX's dominance there. Illustration: Ahmad Sarem/Getty Images

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Investors expect the market for low Earth orbit satellites to grow to about $108 billion by 2035. WSJ's Micah Maidenberg explains what's at stake for the corporate fight over LEO, and whether Amazon and others can put a dent in SpaceX's dominance there.

Why Companies Are Racing to Put Satellites in Low Earth Orbit

Amazon has a really long way to go to catch up to SpaceX when it comes to satellites.

Go Falcon, go Dark.

The technology giant is building up a satellite business called Amazon LEO, and it's had around 300 satellites launched for this network. That's a far cry from the more than 7,000 satellites it's authorized to launch, and it's a real fraction of the roughly 12,000 satellites that SpaceX has launched for its Starlink satellite business. A lot of companies and governments are really focused on low Earth orbit when it comes to satellites. LEO is often defined as nearly a hundred miles above Earth, but no more than roughly 1,200 miles up. Well-known spacecraft, including the International Space Station and the Hubble Space Telescope, are in LEO. For internet satellite operators, LEO has some real advantages. Satellites closer to earth usually offer better performance to users on the ground than those stationed further out in space since signals don't have as long of a distance to travel. Thousands of these satellites are expected to be launched in the years ahead by SpaceX and Amazon and Blue Origin. That's the Jeff Bezos space company. Chinese satellite operators, among others, are all targeting LEO. Building up a LEO satellite system is complex and it requires a lot of scale, and that's one of the reasons why you see SpaceX, led by one of the world's wealthiest persons, Elon Musk, and Amazon pursuing this. Not everybody can. A generation ago satellite operators largely focused on building larger satellites that would be launched to geostationary orbit more than 22,000 miles from Earth. Each GEO satellite, as they're called, is able to provide communication services over big swaths of earth at once because of their distance from the planet. LEO operators, on the other hand, require many more satellites to cover the same area on earth as a single GEO satellite. Some satellite companies and governments are still building and deploying GEO satellites. The European satellite company SES has satellites in what's called MEO, or medium earth orbit, and plans to deploy more satellites there in the years ahead. Internet satellites, wherever they're located in space, are part of the market for high speed internet connections. This is a really big market. Here's how a SpaceX executive described their strategy with Starlink a few years ago.

There is a lot of reasons why SpaceX doing Starlink makes a huge amount of sense. One really key reason is that the addressable market, or the market for global broadband, is on the order of a trillion dollars a year.

One of the big challenges for LEO satellite operators is most consumers, households in wealthier countries already have pretty good access to lower cost, high speed internet. Another challenge for LEO satellites is just that the earth is mostly water. And so when LEO satellites are orbiting around the earth at any given time, they're likely above water. And of course, there's no households to serve in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. So, that's sparked a rush by these companies to find container vessels, cruise ships, airlines, smaller aircraft, customers like that, to try to connect because you want to be using your capacity as much as possible. Investors expect demand for LEO satellites to grow in the years ahead. Goldman Sachs estimated the size of the market to grow to about $108 billion by 2035. SpaceX's revenue has increasingly been driven by Starlink, and this satellite business is expected to play a really big part in SpaceX's IPO this year. But they're not gonna be the only game in town.

Why Companies Are Racing to Put Satellites in Low-Earth Orbit

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