Once again, SpaceX has looked to the stars for naming inspiration.
Elon Musk confirmed on Tuesday (June 23) that SpaceX will call its planned AI satellite megaconstellation "Starmind".
The choice should come as no surprise, as it continues the company's long-running stellar naming theme. Here's a rundown:
- Starship: SpaceX's next-generation launch vehicle, the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built. Starship is designed to be fully and rapidly reusable, a breakthrough that Musk thinks will make Mars settlement economically feasible
- Starbase: The company's facility in South Texas, which serves as Starship's manufacturing and launch hub. In May 2025, Starbase became an incorporated city.
- Starlink: SpaceX's broadband network in low Earth orbit. Starlink is by far the biggest satellite constellation ever assembled; it currently consists of nearly 10,700 active units, and the number is growing all the time.
- Starshield: A modified version of the Starlink satellite that flies national security missions for the U.S. government, focusing on Earth observation, communications and payload-hosting tasks.
- Starfall: SpaceX's newly unveiled uncrewed return capsule, which is designed to carry materials from orbit safely down to Earth.
- Starfactory: The huge Starship production facility at Starbase, which covers about 1 million square feet (93,000 square meters).
Starmind is perhaps the most ambitious of all of these stellar projects. If everything goes according to plan, the megaconstellation will be about 100 times bigger than the current version of Starlink.
"By directly harnessing near-constant solar power with little operating or maintenance costs, these satellites will transform our ability to scale compute," Musk wrote in a February 2026 update about the company's planned AI network.
"It's always sunny in space!" he added. "Launching a constellation of a million satellites that operate as orbital data centers is a first step towards becoming a Kardashev II-level civilization, one that can harness the sun's full power, while supporting AI-driven applications for billions of people today and ensuring humanity's multi-planetary future."
The "star" theme has apparently supplanted a previous SpaceX nomenclature convention. The company named its original rocket line "Falcon" after the Millennium Falcon, Han Solo's ship in the "Star Wars" universe, then followed this same birds-of-prey theme for the vehicles' engines ("Merlin" and "Kestrel"). The company's next-gen engine, the one that gets Starship off the ground, still follows this older custom: it's called "Raptor."
