I don't think regulators should force companies to be conservative in unrelated technical development when it doesn't have any material impact on others.
The Starlink constellations in this proposal are large, and any future development by others will have to account for the orbits of these potential constellations.
That's 30k new objects to plan for, and with two configurations at play, that means accounting for essentially 60k objects in motion, effectively doubling the work someone would have to do to plan their deployments.
Anyways, it is my impression that space is kinda big..
This is, at best, misleading. The objects that have to keep clear of each other are (effectively) points, and they can share orbits with different phasing. The most obvious real-world example of multiple objects sharing an orbit is geostationary orbit.
So the obvious case for geostationary orbits is significantly better than for LEO.
Nevertheless, LEO isn't bad. A height of 400 km translates into a circle of about 42,655 km (orbital length of ISS according to NASA). That is enough to park several satellites in without them being parked bumper to bumper.
Because it encourages squatting and low-value rent seeking from the first people to get there.
It's not like Starlink is,going to exhaust all viable orbits.
These constellations aren't stationary, they move based on their orbital parameters, and to properly predict their orbits, you'll have to account for their future movement for the next while (depending on expected lifetime and how close they come to your intended orbit).
Saying this is like buying a plot of land is missing the level of work and complexity that goes into orbital mechanics.
If you need to illuminate the same area of the earth, which would make sense if you're also looking to serve the same populations, then you'll need to either be at a different altitude or have neighboring or intersecting orbits, which will need to handle the orbits of all other objects. That's why the level of complexity increases a fair bit when you need to plan for two large-scale configurations.
No, but it is worth noting that there are about 7000 satellites in orbit right now, of which a little over half are actually operational[1]. Starlink intends to increase that number 10 fold by launching 30,000 of their own. It will have a significant impact on which orbits are available, it will cause extra work for everyone who operates in space, and (in my opinion) the benefit of "broadband internet everywhere on Earth" isn't so big that people shouldn't think about whether it's worth it. Especially given the fact there are other competitors in the market who'll be wanting to launch their own constellations too.
We could end up with many tens of thousands of internet provider satellites, and the market probably isn't big enough for more than a couple of companies providing that service. At the very least there should be rules demanding that each company makes their satellites interoperable with all their competitors, so if one company withdraws from the market someone else can take over their orbiting hardware so we're not left with immense amounts of space junk.
[1] https://www.geospatialworld.net/blogs/how-many-satellites-ar...
This.
Also, I would expect that there should be some kind of worldwide organism supervising this nowadays, not just the US FCC. I mean, LEO is a whole Earth thing, not just one nation's.
and starlink is in low LEO