Judges reject Viasat’s plea to stop SpaceX Starlink satellite launches
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
I am not a lawyer, but if I’m reading this correctly, the only claim here is that the FCC and SpaceX did not follow proper procedure, but the catalyst is fear of competition.
My opinion is that if a company needs government help to thwart competition, then competition is absolutely needed.
Edit: Formatting is having some issues it seems.
* - This is something that it seems the courts are well positioned to rule upon and about which I have no opinion.
Of course, sometimes the incumbents spend many years constructing regulation after regulation to build a moat. Then somebody comes along with the funding to defy all those regulations. And the incumbent complains that the newcomer is ruining the moat.
Sometimes it takes a good deal of wisdom and discernment to decide which rules are moats and which are legit. Then it takes character to tear down what should be torn down and defend what should be defended.
I couldn’t force a suit saying the FCC was required to do an environmental study, and they didn’t study the light reflected from SpaceX satellites so the approval for the satellites is invalid. I just don’t have any standing there. The US legal system being what it is “It is hurting my business, I am losing dollars.” is pretty good at providing “standing”.
If there was no material impact to Viasat's business, they wouldn't even be able to file the lawsuit.
The courts will decide if SpaceX/FCC acted unfairly towards Viasat by allowing SpaceX to operate under a different set of rules - again, causing Viasat's product to be worse and having a material impact to Viasat's business.
We lost a jumbo jet to the ocean and were unable to find it because we did not have worldwide coverage. How many millions of people are without internet access in rural areas? Don't many consider internet access to be close to a basic human right?
I was considering getting into astronomy myself but do not want to be part of a community like that. It's probably a vocal minority but it's still disappointing.
Not a direct reply, but Starlink will also enable some interesting scenarios around open internet access in places where it doesn't exist today - like the Middle East during the Arab Spring, or in China, or in North Korea.
But this is the problem: it can't. With cables, the cost is location dependent because it is dominated by the local cost of work.
But starlink has limited bandwidth, and their cost is dominated by the satellites and launches, and by the work of highly skilled engineers in America. Every extra subscriber costs them a lot, and they can't make money by launching millions of dollars worth of satellites and charging 10$ a month.
> Not a direct reply, but Starlink will also enable some interesting scenarios around open internet access in places where it doesn't exist today - like the Middle East during the Arab Spring, or in China, or in North Korea.
Why do you think that? Satellite signals are easy to detect and jam, unfortunately. Especially since satellite internet requires you to transmit, not just receive. If you were right, those places would already have satellite television access to news around the world.
Starlink is one of the very few satellite providers that can provide enough bandwidth (due to the large constellation) that an entire village could share a single base station.
This is much more true for cable than it is for satellite launches, a d yet it hasn't really happened.
> Starlink is one of the very few satellite providers that can provide enough bandwidth (due to the large constellation) that an entire village could share a single base station.
Starlink needs a huge paying base to pay for the huge cost of the constellation, which needs to be rebuilt and re-launched every 5 years. Every extra customer reduces the bandwidth that the constellation can offer to every other customer, so overall their cost per customer will be exorbitant.
Remember that the prices we are seeing today are heavily subsidized by the US government, and they are anyway selling at a considerable loss. The bandwidth we are seeing today is the bandwidth of 1600 satellites and a handful of customers - it is basically a best case scenario, at least for the current technology.
Musk always seems to be thinking two steps ahead, so perhaps Starlink is just an enabler for a future, more profitable product.
This does not appear to be a correct statement.
The jet was in contact with satellites, and was well within the coverage area. This is how the Inmarsat technicians were able to provide information about the possible flight path. [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_370_s...
It's pretty ridiculous we don't stream blackbox data in realtime in instead record it locally like it's still the 1950s.
Astronomy is more than a hobby for quite a few people: it’s also an actual scientific field.
Cheaper access to space also means more cheap space-based satellites which provide much higher image quality.
A telescope constellation would be pretty amazing and would allow astronomy pictures never before possible, similar to the black hole image. A constellation like that could create an effective aperture larger than the earth.
Pedantic, but anyone can file a lawsuit about almost anything, regardless of proof or standing or lack thereof. The barrier to doing so is negligible. It would get dismissed at the earliest consideration, but the point is that the filing of a lawsuit means incredibly little.
However, I wonder how the intersection of regulatory frameworks with rapid tech progress intersect here.
I know that until Elon came around, satellite internet was a costly special use affair. So, perhaps the rules ought to be changed but govt moves slower than pvt companies, so they missed the chance.
Also, large scale satellite deployments for broadband internet on a global scale is extremely fresh territory.
It really bothers me when companies that have failed to adapt throw their weight around by trying to leverage legislation to kill competition.
Cable telecoms, car dealerships, turbo tax, etc.
Because they followed the rules while Elon’s companies ignore them? Because that’s what this lawsuit is about.
Frankly that’s a bullshit excuse viasat is making and thankfully the court system knows that and the judge is throwing it out.
With 5+ years of notice of the changing landscape and seeing starlink/spacex progress the geosat companies did nothing.
They’re not even really alleging it’s because they followed rules and spacex didn’t - they’re more complaining that the environmental review for spacex from the FCC wasn’t “enough” (which the FCC disagrees with). It’s not like viasat tried to do LEO and was blocked because of rules.
It’s basically the satellite company equivalent of NIMBY building suits about shadows on a park. The true motives are elsewhere.
This is just a company that sees the writing on the wall using their legal team to try to find ways to stop their competitor rather than actually competing on the merits of their product.
The faster they go bankrupt, the better it’ll be for actual players in the space building real tech.
This is not as simple as that. The current waiver on environmental studies for satellite launches was put in place in an era (the 80s) where individual satellites were not considered a threat. Now we're launching 'constellations'.
It does really smell like some Oracle-level lawsuit driven anti-competitive behavior from viasat. However, as always, the truth is somewhere down the middle.
Satellite companies have six years to plan and respond.
ViaSat have no excuses if they're worried about their competitor. It's amazing about the depth of complacency that the space industry in general sunk to.
Space launch and ISPs are both industries that are accustomed to fat cost-plus contracts, subsidies with no accountability, and market protection from government. They've lived that way for decades, resulting in companies that I'm sure are optimized top to bottom for suckling at the government teat.
With Starlink, in the worst case scenario dead satellites will be in orbit for 2-3 years, and if signs of giving out start showing up SpaceX can quickly and safely steer it to burn up, with a cheap (and likely updated) replacement being sent up within a month.
This isn't really a risk, it's a feature. "Crashing" into the atmosphere means you slow down from orbital velocity and re-enter instead of polluting the orbital environment. It's much worse if you stay in orbit, occupying valuable space, and risking collisions that will create debris clouds occupying much more valuable space (and potentially resulting in chain reactions).
SpaceX has long since designed it's satellites to fully burn up as they re-enter the atmosphere to remove the risk that they'll hit someone on the ground, but even for satellites where that hasn't happened, it's generally preferred that they re-enter the atmosphere than hang out dead in valuable orbits.
He said it's not a risk in the sence that it's not something you avoid, it's something you use regularly. He did not mean "you can just YOLO it"
I think Viasat is mainly hoping to stall SpaceX as they see their business crumbling around them rapidly, but there's some fair questions.
https://www.lightreading.com/opticalip/viasat-presses-fcc-to...
So they are looking for new regulation, based on some rather spurious claims.
The FCC does regulate debris and re-entry hazards. Constellations like SpaceX's have much more strict rules than GEO satellites like Viasat's.
I hope they go out of business. Their services were clearly exploitative, and this is a lame excuse to try and stamp out competition.
> Viasat is worried that its slower Internet service delivered from geostationary satellites will lose customers once Starlink is out of beta and more widely available.
So Viasat has two options: improve their offering to remain competitive, or throw a tantrum and start a lawsuit. Yep, of course it's gonna be option two.
Their complaint, while obviously futile and pretty pathetic given the alternatives, actually had a positive outcome. From the article:
> The FCC did require SpaceX to explain how it will prevent orbital debris, collisions in space, and casualties upon satellite reentry. The FCC also imposed conditions on the license.
This is more of a situation of 'hey, why do _these_ guys get special treatment??'
Which is as good as complaining about nothing. There's no real reason to complain about a slight lowering in altitude.
As far as being visible to sensitive telescopes, that is true, but also not surprising. Telescopes are designed to detect really faint things, so even though Starlink is now almost always darker than the visible limit once fully deployed in operational orbit, it can still show up in sensitive astronomical surveys.
“It’s hard” does not seem like a valid excuse to deny internet to the underserved. Plus, I looked through the manual for the most widely used telescope compositor and it supports tracking published satellite trajectories and automatically dropping the frames when a satellites overhead. It seemed a bit tedious to set up, but the GUI of most of the thing looked positively 1997
There's no law against that.