Constellation deployment milestones
A schedule set by the ITU and national regulators that requires a constellation to put a fixed share of its satellites in orbit within a given time, on pain of losing its spectrum rights.
Spectrum and orbital rights are scarce, and an operator could reserve them through paper filings without ever launching. To prevent that, ITU Resolution 35 and national licenses set milestones: a percentage of the constellation must be in service by specific dates, or the rights shrink to what has been deployed. A launcher delay or the failure of a batch of satellites therefore costs more than the lost hardware: it can strip away part of the project's regulatory value. That risk is not covered by standard launch insurance, which indemnifies the asset and not the right, and it weighs on how constellations are financed.
Resolution 35, adopted at the 2019 World Radiocommunication Conference, requires 10% of the constellation two years after the bringing-into-use deadline, 50% at five years and 100% at seven years; the license the FCC granted to Amazon's Kuiper project on July 30, 2020 requires half of its 3,236 satellites by July 30, 2026, and the first production satellites were launched on April 28, 2025.
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