juliensimon/fcc-ngso-filings

FCC NGSO Satellite Filings

Credit: NASA

Part of a dataset collection on Hugging Face.

Dataset description

Structured metadata for the major FCC NGSO (non-geostationary satellite orbit) constellation filings — the authoritative public record of who has asked the US Federal Communications Commission for permission to launch and operate which mega-constellations. Includes Starlink Gen1 and Gen2, Amazon Project Kuiper, OneWeb, Telesat Lightspeed, and other major systems from the FCC International Bureau Filing System (IBFS).

The FCC IBFS is the regulatory backbone of the LEO broadband race. Every constellation operator that wants to serve US customers (or use US spectrum, or launch from US soil) must obtain FCC authorization through an IBFS filing. The filing discloses the requested number of satellites, orbital shells, frequency bands, and service type. Status transitions from Application Filed through Accepted for Filing, Comment Period, and eventually Grant of Authority or Dismissal. This dataset captures that process as structured data.

Where the companion constellation-health datasets (juliensimon/starlink-fleet-data, juliensimon/kuiper-fleet-data, juliensimon/oneweb-fleet-data) track what is actually flying, this dataset tracks what was asked for. The gap between requested_satellites and the observed operational count is the honest measure of how close each operator is to delivering on its FCC promises. Two hand-curated columns — requested_satellites and orbital_shells_json — are transcribed from filing PDF attachments because those technical parameters are not exposed on the HTML landing page; all other fields are scraped from the public IBFS record. Weekly refresh.

Source: FCC IBFS via fcc.report (third-party mirror, not affiliated with the FCC). The underlying filings are public records of the US federal government.

This dataset is suitable for tabular classification tasks.

Schema

Column	Type	Description	Sample	Null %
file_number	object	FCC IBFS file number in the form PREFIX-TYPE-YYYYMMDD-NNNNN (e.g. SAT-LOA-20190704-00057)	SAT-LOI-20160428-00041	0.0%
applicant	object	Filing applicant legal entity (e.g. Kuiper Systems LLC, Space Exploration Holdings, LLC)	WorldVu Satellites Limited	0.0%
operator_family	object	Normalized operator group (spacex, amazon, oneweb, blue_origin, telesat, ast, boeing, viasat, globalstar, iridium, other)	oneweb	0.0%
system_name	object	Human-readable constellation name (Starlink Gen2, Project Kuiper, OneWeb Gen1, etc.)	OneWeb Gen1	0.0%
filing_type	object	IBFS filing type extracted from the file number: LOA (Launch and Operate), MOD (Modification), MPL (Market-Access Petition), AMD (Amendment), LOI (Letter of Intent), PDR (Petition for Declaratory Ruling)	LOI	0.0%
nature_of_service	object	FCC service classification (Fixed Satellite Service, Mobile Satellite Service, etc.)	Fixed Satellite Service	0.0%
status	object	Current processing status (Action Complete, Pending, Dismissed, etc.)	Action Complete	0.0%
last_action	object	Most recent action taken (Grant of Authority, Application Filed, etc.)	Grant of Authority	0.0%
date_filed	datetime64[ns]	Date the filing was submitted to the FCC	2016-04-28 00:00:00	0.0%
date_granted	datetime64[ns]	Date authorization was granted (null for pending or denied applications)	2017-06-23 00:00:00	20.0%
last_action_date	datetime64[ns]	Date of the most recent action on the filing	2017-06-23 00:00:00	20.0%
requested_satellites	Int64	Total satellite count requested in the filing, as disclosed in filing attachments	720	0.0%
orbital_shells_json	object	JSON array of shell descriptors (altitude_km, inclination_deg, satellite_count) — structure of the requested constellation	[{"altitude_km": 1200, "inclination_d...	0.0%
frequency_bands	object	Comma-separated MHz band edges from the Frequency Summary table (e.g. 17700-18200,27500-28350)	10700-11700,11700-12200,12200-12700,1...	0.0%
description	object	Filing description or abstract as published on the IBFS landing page	Worldvu Satellites Limited, doing bus...	0.0%
applicant_address	object	Mailing address on the filing	1785 Greensboro Station Place, Tower ...	0.0%
ibfs_url	object	Canonical URL of the filing on fcc.report	https://fcc.report/IBFS/SAT-LOI-20160...	0.0%
fetched_at_utc	datetime64[ns, UTC]	UTC timestamp when this row was refreshed from fcc.report	2026-04-15 13:13:19.010694+00:00	0.0%

Quick stats

• 5 NGSO constellation filings tracked
• 40,040 total satellites requested across all filings
• 3 filings with Grant of Authority (Action Complete)
• Operator families: spacex: 2, oneweb: 1, amazon: 1, telesat: 1
• Source: FCC IBFS via fcc.report (third-party mirror, not affiliated with the FCC)

Usage

from datasets import load_dataset

ds = load_dataset("juliensimon/fcc-ngso-filings", split="train")
df = ds.to_pandas()

from datasets import load_dataset
import json

ds = load_dataset("juliensimon/fcc-ngso-filings", split="train").to_pandas()

# Requested satellites per operator family
print(ds.groupby("operator_family")["requested_satellites"].sum().sort_values(ascending=False))

# Gap between requested and flying — pair with kuiper-fleet-data / starlink-fleet-data
kuiper = ds[ds["operator_family"] == "amazon"].iloc[0]
print(f"Kuiper requested {kuiper['requested_satellites']} sats across {len(json.loads(kuiper['orbital_shells_json']))} shells")

# Filings timeline
print(ds[["file_number", "applicant", "date_filed", "date_granted", "status"]].sort_values("date_filed"))

Data source

https://fcc.report/IBFS/

Update schedule

Weekly on Monday at 10:00 UTC via GitHub Actions

Related datasets

• juliensimon/starlink-fleet-data

• juliensimon/kuiper-fleet-data

• juliensimon/oneweb-fleet-data

• juliensimon/ast-spacemobile-fleet-data

• juliensimon/blue-origin-launches

• juliensimon/spacex-launches

• juliensimon/ula-launches

• juliensimon/constellation-census

• juliensimon/gcat

• juliensimon/gcat-satcat

• juliensimon/launch-cost

If you find this dataset useful, please consider giving it a like on Hugging Face. It helps others discover it.

About the author

Created by Julien Simon — AI Operating Partner at Fortino Capital. Part of the Space Datasets collection.

Citation

@dataset{fcc_ngso_filings,
  title = {FCC NGSO Satellite Filings},
  author = {juliensimon},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/juliensimon/fcc-ngso-filings},
  publisher = {Hugging Face}
}

License

CC-BY-4.0