Kuiper Deployment Gets Go-Ahead From FCC

Amazon's Kuiper got FCC International Bureau sign-off on its updated orbital debris plan. In an order Wednesday, the bureau said the assent means Kuiper can begin deployment. The constellation's 2020 OK (see 2007310057) was conditioned on approval of the plan. The bureau put a series of conditions on the approval, including semi-annual reporting concerning the number of satellites launched and disposal reliability. SpaceX wanted the agency to use an "object-years" method for measuring post-mission disposal, as was required for SpaceX's second-generation constellation approval. The agency declined, saying since Kuiper hasn't begun deployment, that condition isn't yet necessary. The agency left the door open to imposing the condition later, after Kuiper starts deployment. The bureau imposed the same reporting requirement for collision avoidance system outages that it put on the second-gen Starlinks. Similar to the Starlink second-generation authorization, the bureau also conditioned the Kuiper approval on Amazon continuing to coordinate with NASA and the National Science Foundation to minimize impacts to NASA's science missions and to optical ground-based astronomy.