The FCC Space Bureau signed off on the license transfers in Eutelsat's buy of OneWeb, conditioned on New Eutelsat abiding by the commitments it made to DOJ and DOD, per a public notice Friday.

Hundreds of millions of devices will be available by this time next year that support Globalstar's Band 53 spectrum, Executive Chairman Jay Monroe said Thursday as the company announced Q2 financial results. It and Qualcomm announced in March they were collaborating on use of Band 53 in mobile devices (see 303070041). Globalstar said revenue for the quarter was $55.1 million, up from $36.8 million last year. Monroe said growth is being driven partly by Globalstar's commercial IoT business and should continue due to introduction of two-way services and products this year. The company remains on pace for 2025 launch of 17 satellites to replenish and extend the life of its existing constellation, said Tim Taylor, vice president-finance, business operations and strategy.

The Committee for the Assessment of Foreign Participation in the U.S. Telecommunications Services Sector submitted proposed conditions for Eutelsat's proposed OneWeb acquisition (see 2207250041). The proposed conditions cover such issues as compliance with all court orders for authorized electronic surveillance and preventing unauthorized access to U.S. records and domestic communications, per an NTIA filing Wednesday in docket 22-404.

Spectrum between 7 GHz and 24 GHz currently allocated to satellite service is heavily used, and demand for services is increasing, and there's little additional satellite spectrum allocation, the Global Satellite Operators Association said Tuesday. Added to that pressure is that a number of World Radiocommunication Conference 2023 agenda items "seek to bring additional applications to existing satellite-allocated spectrum," GSOA said. The satellite industry's continued use of the 7-24 GHz bands "will bring large-scale benefits to economies and society as a whole," it said.

The proposed modification of the Kuiper non-geostationary orbit satellite constellation authorization is an Amazon tactic to let it continue to delay launching commercial service while avoiding the consequences of that delay, SpaceX told the FCC Space Bureau Monday in a petition to deny. The modification would change the orbital parameters of the constellation and reduce it by four, to 3,232 satellites. SpaceX said Kuiper's proposing to include two prototype satellites in the commercial constellation is a means of "skirting build-out requirements" and letting it claim it has a built system. SpaceX said Kuiper's proposed reorganization of its constellation needs to be accompanied with an explanation of how the reconfiguration can avoid collisions with other operators in similar orbits. With a Chinese mega-constellation beginning to launch, "just crossing fingers is no longer a sufficient strategy -- if it ever was," SpaceX said. It said granting Kuiper the same authority to operate during the launch and early orbit phase that SpaceX received is fine, as the two constellations are similarly situated, but that also reinforces the need to impose on Amazon all the space sustainability conditions applied to SpaceX. Kuiper didn't comment Tuesday.

The FCC needn't wait for international harmonization via the ITU and can instead lead on mobile supplemental coverage from space globally, with other jurisdictions then able to follow the agency's lead, AST SpaceMobile representatives told an aide to Commissioner Nathan Simington, per a Space Bureau filing Monday. It urged the agency to allow SCS operations involving non-nationwide licenses as long as the applicant can make an adequate interference showing. It reaffirmed it plans to launch its first five commercial satellites in Q1 2024 but said obtaining V-band authority beforehand "is critical" to that.

EchoStar's Jupiter 3, intended to supplement the company's satellite-delivered broadband connectivity in the U.S. and Latin America, successfully launched Saturday, the company said. It said the geosynchronous orbit satellite will bring more than 500 Gbps of additional capacity to the Jupiter fleet and should enable download speeds of up to 100 Mbps in some markets.

As part of its eventual goal of a "superhighway" between the Earth and the moon featuring third-party services such as spacecraft space situational awareness, edge computing and communications, Quantum Space wants to launch and operate one Sentry non-geostationary orbit cubesat. In an FCC Space Bureau application Friday, Quantum said the Sentry NGSO would do space-based optical observations and be used for training personnel on satellite integration, data collection and operations. It said it hopes to launch Sentry on SpaceX's February 2024 Transporter-10 mission.

A draft order about making spectrum available in the 2025-2110 MHz band on a secondary basis for space launches is circulating among FCC commissioners, Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel's office said Friday. “These rules will ensure commercial space launches have the necessary spectrum resources for reliable communications no matter their mission [and] promote economic strength, safety, competitiveness, and innovation," she said. The draft order also would expand the spectrum available for commercial space operations on a secondary basis in the 2200-2290 MHz band from four channels to the entire band, and amend the 399.9-400.05 MHz band allocation to allow deployment of federal satellites, her office said.

Commercial space operators need to consider the ethical and fiduciary issues of how having the DOD as a customer could make them targets in a space conflict, Even Rogers, CEO of space intelligence startup True Anomaly, said Wednesday on a Hudson Institute panel. The Russia-Ukraine war highlighted how commercial operators become targets when they support DOD, and they easily could be targeted before DOD or intelligence community space assets since it's unclear if the U.S. would defend commercial providers in space, he said. Redwire Executive Vice President-National Security Space Dean Bellamy said artificial stovepipes in space traffic management, like DOD vs. Commerce, are breaking down as the agencies are working better among themselves, with commercial operators and allies. He said that increased collaboration between Commerce and the Space Force resulted in better space traffic management and safety in space.