Another
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:
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."
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Michael Wall is the Spaceflight and Tech Editor for Space.com and joined the team in 2010. He primarily covers human and robotic spaceflight, military space, and exoplanets, but has been known to dabble in the space art beat. His book about the search for alien life, "Out There," was published on Nov. 13, 2018. Before becoming a science writer, Michael worked as a herpetologist and wildlife biologist. He has a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology from the University of Sydney, Australia, a bachelor's degree from the University of Arizona, and a graduate certificate in science writing from the University of California, Santa Cruz. To find out what his latest project is, you can follow Michael on Twitter.