Rwanda's Cinnamon filings with the ITU (2021)
A request for 327,320 satellites filed by Rwanda in 2021, an example of the paper satellite that reserves spectrum and orbits without real craft.
The law of space radiocommunications protects whoever first declares a system to the International Telecommunication Union: the filing sets a coordination priority that later entrants must respect. This rule creates an incentive to file for more than one will ever launch, to occupy rights or trade them, known as a paper satellite. For a real operator or its insurer, these reservations are a concrete risk: they delay coordination, crowd orbital shells and can impose frequency constraints. The ITU responded with milestones for the progressive deployment of constellations. Rwanda's 2021 filing, unrelated to any existing fleet, made the problem visible.
On September 21, 2021, the Rwandan government filed with the ITU two non-geostationary constellations, Cinnamon-217 and Cinnamon-937; the second, across 27 orbital shells between 550 and 643 kilometers, totaled 327,320 satellites. An earlier filing, Anton-1N0, had been made on August 20, 2021 under another name.
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