At its March meeting, the FCC unanimously approved a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) seeking comments on a proposal to make additional spectrum available for command and control of spacecraft supporting emergent space operations, but which do not use spectrum as part of any radiocommunications services provided to the public. The NPRM was dubbed “Weird Space Stuff” by the commission.
On this edition of The Journal of Space Commerce podcast, Tom Patton talks with FCC Space Bureau Chief Jay Schwartz about the proposal, as well as some of the history and the broader range of functions carried out by the Space Bureau.
Schwartz said that the number of applications that have been submitted to the FCC for spectrum authorization has increased by more than 200 percent over the past decade, and that is just a part of the story.
“There’s also been a significant change in the types of applications in terms of the complexity that we’ve gotten. So a decade ago, about 80% of the applications were geostationary applications, relatively straightforward to license. And typically you’re dealing with just one satellite, right? What we’re seeing today is we’re seeing that flipped and something on the order of about 80% are your NGSO or your LEO constellations,” Schwartz said. “So more complex, larger, obviously, in terms of the number of satellites, more complex interference environments. And then actually, we’re also getting a number of things, we might touch on this a little bit later, that don’t even fall into that traditional NGSO or GSO category. So we’ve licensed a few commercial lunar missions, for instance, and I think we’ll continue to see more and more of those type of emerging space activities.”
The “Weird Space Stuff” NPRM will be open for comments after it is published in the Federal Register.
The Journal of Space Commerce podcast is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and many other popular podcasting platforms as well as here on Substack.
