Amazon has called on the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to reject SpaceX’s million-data-center-satellite proposal.

Amazon Leo, the cloud and e-commerce firm's satellite unit, criticized the commission’s decision to receive and process SpaceX's filing, alleging it to be speculative and conceptual.

“Deploying the proposed million-satellite constellation would take centuries, even assuming the availability of all global launch capacity to do so. … The application seems to describe a lofty ambition rather than a real plan – and a speculative placeholder rather than a complete application under the commission’s rules,” Amazon Leo’s said.

“Nonethless, it risks real harm. [SpaceX’s] application has raised alarm from astronomers and environmental groups, and risks worsening international backlash from regulators already concerned about the monopolization of orbital resources.”

SpaceX has sought the authority to operate a constellation of “up to” one million Starlink satellites, a goal resembling the “first step towards becoming a Kardashev type II level civilization," a measure of technological sophistication proposed by Soviet Astronomer Nikolai Kardashev in 1964.

On March 6, Amazon Leo sent an open letter to the FCC detailing its objections to the application, the 17-page filing detailing complaints around the realism of the proposal, the industry-disrupting potential of the projected constellation, and the allegation that the application appeared only “an exercise in publicity and messaging."

Incumbent satellite operator Viasat also called for the application to be denied.

SpaceX stressed its constellation’s emerging capacity to harness the immense power of the sun to process AI workloads in space, leaving the expensive and energy-intensive business of terrestrial data centers in the dust. Amazon Leo drew attention to the absence of details around the design of these miracle satellites or how they transmitted their incalculable mass of civilization-advancing data.

Amazon Leo drew attention to the FCC’s practice of throwing out filings that were too creative in their proclamations, devoid of the kind of definitive information befitting a government document. It suggests the legitimization of such a document would force operators in low-Earth orbit to structure their own plans around a titanic constellation that they don’t know anything about, and isn’t logically possible to orbit within the 21st century.

“The replenishment math is equally sobering,” Amazon Leo’s letter read, “assuming a five-year satellite lifespan, sustaining a million-satellite constellation would require replacing 200,000 satellites per year—more than 44 times the entire global satellite launch output in 2025.”

The letter also made note of the growing civilian dissatisfaction with Starlink’s capacity to dim the visibility of stars everywhere on the surface of the Earth. More than 1,200 comments were submitted around SpaceX’s application, thought to be encouraged by anti-light pollution groups DarkSky International and the American Astronomical Society.

“Do not rubber-stamp a Simpsons plot,” wrote one comment. Referencing the popular animated sitcom episode Who Shot Mr. Burns? in which the eponymous maniacal tech baron blots out the light of the sun for his own financial gain, to the murderous rage of much of the cast.