Foreign Satellites Should Have to Follow US Debris Rules: FCC's Simington

Foreign-flagged satellites providing service to the U.S. should be subject to the same orbital debris mitigation rules as U.S. licensed operators, FCC Commissioner Nathan Simington said on a Hudson Institute panel Monday. Market access and license equilibration is the "most significant card" the agency can play in debris mitigation, he said. That would incentivize other nations to harmonize their debris rules with the U.S., he said. Simington also urged passage of the Satellite and Telecommunications Streamlining Act (HR-1338). He said creating the Space Bureau was important, but it needs to be paired with formal congressional expansion of bureau resources. He said it needs at least 100 full-time employees, mostly engineers. Absent those bodies, he said, the FCC runs the risk of more operators heading to other nations to get regulatory approvals. Future approvals should be conditioned on retrospective assessments of operators' failures or successes in meeting orbital debris mitigation benchmarks, he said. Noting the FCC has asserted its regulatory oversight over debris for years, Simington said it clearly has authority to oversee debris. Rather than waiting for international consensus on debris, he said, "We may as well wait on Godot." Since the U.S. will either harmonize other nations to its debris rules or inevitably be harmonized by others, "I choose the former," he said. Debris is inherently an international issue, and needs to be addressed that way, said Darren McKnight, LeoLabs senior technical fellow. Much of the debris problem is from large derelict rocket bodies that have been left in space, and there should be a balance of mitigation efforts with remediation, he said. The behavior of satellite operators is more important than the numbers of satellites any one of them puts up, he said.