A British fleet that's mostly OneWeb
The United Kingdom owns 761 active satellites as of October 17, 2026, 4.5% of the world total and the third largest national fleet. Of those, 652 belong to OneWeb, 86% of the British total. The rest of the table is small by comparison.
OneWeb was founded in 2012 as WorldVu by Greg Wyler and launched its first satellites on February 27, 2019. It filed for bankruptcy on March 27, 2020, and a consortium led by Bharti Global and the UK government agreed to buy it on July 3, 2020, with about 500 million dollars each, and the sale closed on November 20, 2020. The company completed a merger with the French operator Eutelsat in September 2023. GCAT still lists the satellites' owner country as the United Kingdom, so the network counts for Britain.
What they do
Communications accounts for 725 of the United Kingdom's active satellites (95%).
Where they orbit
Who operates them
The largest operators, and the largest families of satellites, owned by the United Kingdom.
By operator
By satellite family
Operator names are as written in GCAT, usually transliterated from the original language. Families group satellites by the first word of their name.
How the fleet has grown
At the end of 2005, the United Kingdom had 37 payloads in Earth orbit. By the end of 2025 it had 787.
Launches
The United Kingdom has made 2 orbital launch attempts since its first in 1970, and 0 of them in 2025. Its busiest year was 1970 with 1.
Britain's own rocket
The United Kingdom's own launches come to two in GCAT's log, both from Woomera, Australia. The first, on September 2, 1970, failed. The second, on October 28, 1971, put the Prospero satellite into orbit on a Black Arrow rocket. Britain's first satellite, Ariel 1, had flown earlier, in April 1962, on a US rocket.
The program ended after Prospero, in favour of buying US Scout rockets. The Science Museum Group calls the UK the only country to have developed and then abandoned a successful satellite-launching rocket. Prospero is expected to stay in orbit into the 2070s.
Why Virgin Orbit's flight doesn't count
A launch from British soil did take place in the 2020s, from Spaceport Cornwall on January 9, 2023, but it isn't one of the United Kingdom's two. The rocket was Virgin Orbit's, dropped from a carrier aircraft, and it failed to reach orbit after an upper stage anomaly. It carried nine satellites from seven customers. Virgin Orbit filed for bankruptcy on April 4, 2023. GCAT credits that launch to the United States.
That's the same ownership-versus-launcher distinction behind every number on this page. GCAT credits a launch to the country of the launch vehicle and a satellite to the country of its owner, so a flight can take off in Britain and count for the United States.
Built in Britain, flown elsewhere
British industry's best-known satellite maker is Surrey Satellite Technology, founded in 1985 in Guildford as a spin-off of the University of Surrey. The university's satellite work began earlier, with UoSAT-1 in 1981, and the company is now owned by Airbus Defence and Space. Many of its satellites have flown on other countries' rockets, including RapidEye, UK-DMC 2, Deimos-1 and exactView-1 from Baikonur and NovaSAR-1 by ISRO.
None of that adds to the British launch count, and a satellite built in Guildford for a foreign customer is counted for the customer. The categories show how far the fleet is from the maker: communications account for 725 of 761, 95%, with 20 Earth imaging and 9 technology demonstrators.
One company, several names
Almost all of the fleet, 661 satellites, flies in the lowest band, below 600 km. The operator column shows how a single network can appear under several labels: 523 satellites under One Web (NAA), 109 under One Web and 20 under Eut. One Web.
The rocket record is the most mixed on this site: 458 of its 761 active satellites flew on rockets credited to France, 211 on American rockets and 80 on Indian rockets. OneWeb's Soyuz flights are credited to France, its Falcon 9 flights to the United States and its LVM3 flights to India.
Another 33 satellites sit in a family GCAT groups under the single letter O, the same number as the 33 British satellites in medium Earth orbit. The operator labels O3B SES and O3B suggest that this is the O3b network run by the satellite operator SES.
For the biggest fleets by comparison, see the United States and China, and for other European states, France and Germany.