SpaceX Urges Second-Gen Conditions on Others

SpaceX wants the conditions the FCC put on its second-generation constellation to be required of other satellite applications pending before the agency. In a series of near-identical filings with the International Bureau Tuesday, SpaceX said those conditions should be required of Amazon's Kuiper, Tomorrow Company's earth exploration satellite service constellation and Kepler's requested U.S. market access for its mobile satellite service. The conditions SpaceX seeks include the other operators having to file semi-annual reports on collision avoidance maneuvers and satellite disposal, including any difficulties or failures, and the agency employing with those operators a performance-based method for assessing disposal failures that accounts for the number of failed satellites and their entire passive decay time. SpaceX also urged the FCC to require the operators to coordinate with the National Science Foundation to reach agreement about mitigating their satellites' impact on optical ground-based astronomy and that there be related annual reporting requirements. SpaceX said questions remain about FCC authority regarding space sustainability, but the agency's rules, to be effective, "must apply ... equally to similarly situated operators, and not through a patchwork of conflicting licensing conditions." Adopting those conditions for the others would create "a meaningful and broadly applicable baseline for sustainable operations in space." The FCC, Kuiper, Tomorrow and Kepler didn't comment Wednesday. "The strategy seems more likely to be to hobble competitors, by increasing their perceived regulatory risk, especially in a challenging economic environment where those competitors either need to raise money, or (in the case of Kuiper) convince senior executives to continue pouring billions of dollars into the project," satellite and spectrum consultant Tim Farrar emailed. He said those operators aren't likely to advocate for the conditions to be removed from SpaceX. "In reality SpaceX doesn’t need them to be removed anytime soon, it will take several years (at a minimum) to get 12,000 Gen1 and Gen2 Starlink satellites on orbit," he said.