Space Industry Increasingly Calling for More Regulation

"For sure there needs to be a beefed-up regulatory environment" internationally to ensure responsible space use, given the increasingly democratized use of space, Telesat CEO Dan Goldberg said. Noting the evolution of international commercial aviation, space operators have to partner with government to establish a similar framework for space, said Sarah Schellpfeffer, Northrop Grumman space sector vice president.

Most satellite operators are well within compliance with government guidelines, but those guidelines are well out of date, said Space Data Association Director Toby Nassif. “Things have gotten busier in space,” with the SDA’s Space Data Center processing about 4,000 conjunctions per day, up about 500 a day from last year, he said. He said orbits have limited carrying capacity before they become "full," and the work hasn't been done to determine how many satellites a particular orbit can hold. Those answers need to be built into future licensing regimes, he said.

One thing needing updating is the 25-year deorbiting rule, which no longer reflects technologies and satellite operator practices, said Darren McKnight, LeoLabs senior technical fellow. "Being compliant is not being safe," he said. He said more than 50% of the fragments in low earth orbit come from three events: 2007’s Chinese anti-satellite test, 2021’s Russian anti-satellite test and 2009's Russian satellite collision with an Iridium satellite. If more remediation steps aren't taken, there will be increasing problems of untraceable objects peppering orbit. An approach of "study, wait and hope is for the '90s," he said.

Citing growing numbers of mega constellations and the increased orbital debris dangers they inherently bring, former NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said space preservation needs to be a big focus of all commercial space businesses. “We are adding fuel that when a collision happens … you could lose low earth orbit altogether,” he said. He criticized Congress for not funding the Commerce Department at the level it needs for space situational awareness and space traffic management oversight and coordination. He said the U.S. regulatory regime isn't properly equipped to deal with all the needs related to low earth orbit (LEO).

Some studies predict a rising interference noise floor coming due to the low earth orbit boom, but it isn’t materializing so far, Kratos RF products Director Paul Isaac said. He said LEO operators’ tech is relatively sophisticated and they're incentivized not to interfere by their planning to integrate with geostationary orbit (GSO) constellations in mesh LEO/GSO offerings. He said the tech enables such mitigation steps as stopping transmissions when in a GSO arc. He said the interference environment could be increasingly challenging as time goes on and LEO satellite numbers grow, though automated tech could help mitigate it.

LEOs pose a danger of “death by a thousand wounds" to GSO operations because they drive a rise in noise floor and it's difficult to pinpoint particular GSO culprits, Intelsat Vice President-Spectrum Strategy Hazem Moakkit said from the audience. He said equivalent power flux density isn't being measured to determine regulatory compliance, and in many cases it's not even clear how to measure it.

Interference from growing numbers of constellations will be a big issue at the 2023 World Radiocommunication Conference, Integrasys CEO Alvazo Sanchez said. He said interference from mobile service terminals is rising and reports to the ITU of interference are multiplying rapidly. Several interference experts urged open standards for equipment to help address interference issues. SatProf President Ralph Brooker said filings with the FCC are often vague, lacking enough concrete data that can be used to plan for avoiding interference when using the same spectrum bands. There's a strong drive among satellite operators to make all that data proprietary and closed, he said.

GSO will continue to capture the lion’s share of satcom revenue through 2030, though LEO will be growing quickly by the decade’s end, Northern Sky Research said. It said GSO high-throughput satellites (HTS) should generate a cumulative $96 billion in revenue between 2020 and 2030, compared with a cumulative $30 billion for non-geostationary (NGSO) HTS. It said the decline in global mean prices for mobility and backhaul and broadband have started to level off. NSR President Brady Grady said NGSOs aren't killing GSO, but they will challenge it, especially if operators don't innovate. NSR said NGSO launch prices will continue to decline during the decade, while GSO launch pricing, which had been declining, will likely level off this year and the future. It said with SpaceX, Arianespace and ISRO dominating the launch marketplace for small satellites, the growing number of smallsat launchers is fighting for a relatively small remaining slice. It said there are too many launchers and proposed launch sites to support that activity. NSR said the volume of satellite manufacturing and equipment facilities worldwide being announced or scaling up in 2021 raises questions about their necessity and oversupply.

Satellite 2022 Notebook

The long-expected consolidation in the satellite industry won't stop with the Viasat/Inmarsat deal, and further deals likely will be announced in the coming 12 months, NSR's Grady said. Driving that consolidation will be such industry trends as ongoing erosion of the video market, cheaper access to space, the emergence of constellation competitors and the need for scale in the connectivity business, he said.

Satellite bandwidth pricing pressure is alleviating somewhat, particularly in areas like aeronautical connectivity, where demand is bigger than supply, said NSR analyst Joseph Ibeh. But as NGSO supply comes online in coming years, pressure on pricing “will be massive” and will cause more price erosion, he said.

Don’t expect more SpaceX M&A anytime soon. “We don't do M&A well,” President Gwynne Shotwell said, noting the company doing just two deals in its 20-year history, one of them the 2021 acquisition of Swarm. “We grow organically,” she said.

One hurdle in the quest for inexpensive terminals is that it would be a low-margin commodity business, said John Finney, CEO of satellite terminals company Isotropic Systems. The likely market for such terminals is consumer broadband, which runs contrary to a lot of companies' focus on differentiation, he said. "We want to create value, not commodity," he said.