Space Commerce Week

Federal regulators have signed off on Amazon’s $11.5 billion purchase of Globalstar . The FCC approved the transfer of Globalstar’s licenses to Amazon in an order adopted Oct. 27. The approval covers about 25 megahertz of Globalstar’s internationally harmonized mobile-satellite spectrum. Amazon takes 100 percent control of the company. Globalstar’s U.S. subsidiaries keep their names and their auth...

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration has changed the designs and flight plans for both commercial landers in its Artemis program. The goal is still a crewed Moon landing in 2028. The changes cover landers from Blue Origin and SpaceX. NASA laid them out a news conference at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The biggest shift is in the mission order. Artemis III won’t land. Instead, four...

The U.S. State Department is putting five million dollars into a new program meant to build space partnerships between the United States and other countries. It’s called Project Constellation . The goal is a long-term platform that connects governments, industry, academia, entrepreneurs and international organizations, and builds capacity in emerging space economies. Planned activities include com...

NASA and the Department of Energy have signed a memorandum of understanding that sets a framework for joint work on space nuclear power and propulsion . NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman and Energy Secretary Chris Wright signed the agreement Oct. 8 in Washington. The signing took place at a science summit hosted by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. The agreement covers advan...

The FCC has authorized SpaceX to deploy and operate a constellation of 15,000 satellite s built to deliver service directly to ordinary mobile phones. The order, released Tuesday by the FCC’s Space Bureau and Wireless Telecommunications Bureau, grants SpaceX’s application in part and defers it in part. The satellites will fly in nine orbital shells, at altitudes between about 203 and 208 miles. In...

The FCC’s Space Bureau has set a new interference threshold for satellite broadband sharing. It’s a lower signal limit — the one satellite operator SpaceX pushed for — over objections from rival operator SES. The update revises a dataset of geostationary satellite links, or GSO links, used to check whether new broadband satellites in lower orbits interfere with them. Those lower-orbit systems are...

President Donald Trump signed an executive order late last week creating the United States Space Academy , a planned institution to train engineers, technicians, operators and astronauts for the nation’s space programs. The president signed the order at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, during the same event where he presented the Artemis II crew with the Congressional Space Medal of Honor....

President Donald Trump has signed a new national policy for commercial space transportation , directing federal agencies to expand launch infrastructure and prioritize commercial providers for government missions. The memorandum, titled “The National Space Transportation Policy,” replaces a policy directive issued in 2013. It sets a goal of supporting more than 1,000 orbital launches and reentries...

Office of Space Commerce Director Taylor Jordan testified before the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee’s space subcommittee on July 15, defending a new framework called the Space Commerce Certification . The proposal is the Trump administration’s answer to a long‑standing problem: a growing number of commercial space activities don’t fall under any existing federal license. Currently,...

SpaceX priced its initial public offering on June 11th and closed its Nasdaq debut at $161 a share, up 19% on day one and up another 20% the session after, making it the largest IPO in stock market history by several measures. After hitting a high of about $226 on June 26th, the stock has since settled to an average price of $175 per share, give or take a few dollars. [Paywall] The company trades...

HEADLINES Blue Origin plans to return its New Glenn heavy-lift rocket to flight by the end of this year, following a pad-side anomaly during a hotfire test in late May at Launch Complex 36 in Florida. Pad cleanup and debris removal are complete, and reconstruction is underway. Blue Origin says it has finished the first two phases of a five-phase recovery plan and is now working through design and...

Stockholm-based private equity firm EQT has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Exolaunch , a Germany-based satellite deployment technology and launch mission management company, marking the investment firm’s first move into the space sector. The acquisition is being made through EQT’s X fund, with the transaction expected to close during the fourth quarter of 2026. Financial terms were...

The United States has begun enrolling foreign governments into its Traffic Coordination System for Space, marking the first expansion of the system beyond commercial satellite operators. The Department of Commerce’s Office of Space Commerce has opened what it calls National Government Account access. OSC hopes to build a global space situational awareness coordination framework under Space Policy...

Four astronauts have been assigned to Artemis III , a two-week Earth orbit test mission scheduled for 2027 that will demonstrate rendezvous and docking operations with commercial lunar landers from Blue Origin and SpaceX. The crew will include NASA astronaut Randy Bresnik as commander, ESA astronaut Luca Parmitano as pilot, and NASA astronauts Frank Rubio and Andre Douglas as mission specialists....

In what appears to be a major change in direction, a NASA spokesperson said the agency will be pulling back from the CLD Core Module approach to developing a replacement for the International Space Station. Details are still thin, but NASA spokesperson Bethany Stevens posted recently on X that the agency was going to re-think the strategy. “In the spirit of learning from past programmatic challeng...

NASA is reshaping its leadership structure in what Administrator Jared Isaacman is calling a realignment to accelerate mission delivery. Under the reorganization announced last week, the agency is consolidating its five mission directorates into three. The ‘Exploration Systems Development’ mission directorate and the ‘Space Operations’ mission directorate are merging into a new ‘Human Spaceflight’...

NASA’s own watchdog is raising serious concerns about the agency’s commercial lunar lander programs, and the findings touch everything from cost controls to crew safety. The agency’s Office of Inspector General has issued audits covering both the Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative, known as C-L-P-S, and the Human Landing Systems program, or H-L-S, which is developing crewed landers for t...

On May first, the Commission released a landmark Report and Order replacing decades-old energy caps with a performance-based spectrum sharing framework. The ruling is designed to sharpen competition between satellite, cable, and terrestrial wireless providers. And then, on May twelfth, the F-C-C issued a separate approval for SpaceX to acquire approximately 65 megahertz of mid-band spectrum from E...

The Federal Communications Commission has updated the rules governing how geostationary and non-geostationary satellite systems share spectrum . The Commission voted 3-0 on April 30 to approve a Report and Order that replaces a framework dating back to the late 1990s. That old framework was known as Equivalent Power Flux Density, or EPFD. The problem is that the satellite market no longer looks li...

The Federal Communications Commission made two significant moves this week that together paint a clear picture: the agency is on a mission to make America the global leader in direct-to-device satellite connectivity. First, the big-picture move . The FCC’s Space Bureau released a decision reaffirming exclusive spectrum rights for existing licensees in key direct-to-device frequency bands — and dis...

The House Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Communications and Technology has taken up the Satellite and Telecommunications Streamlining -- or SAT Streamlining Act . The bill is aimed at modernizing how the Federal Communications Commission licenses satellite operators -- a process that industry witnesses say hasn’t kept pace with the realities of today’s market. Tom Stroup, president of the Sa...

The Federal Communications Commission is on the verge of a major overhaul in how satellites share spectrum — and the economic stakes are enormous. F-C-C Chairman Brendan Carr announced the Commission will vote on a new order to modernize its satellite spectrum-sharing rules . If adopted, the changes could unlock more than two billion dollars in economic benefits and enable up to seven times more c...

The European Union is pressing ahead with its landmark EU Space Act — even as the regulation faces mounting legal questions from its own advisers and a sharp rebuke from the United States government. The Council of the EU circulated a Presidency compromise text this spring, with a key negotiating session scheduled for April 21st. But the road to final agreement is getting more complicated by the w...

Here’s a number that would have seemed like science fiction three years ago — one-hundred-and-seventy million dollars for a Series A round . That’s what Starcloud just pulled in — and they plan to use it to put data centers in orbit. The company closed a $170 million Series A at a $1.1 billion valuation — making it a unicorn just seventeen months after its Y Combinator demo day. According to Starc...

NASA is not tiptoeing into the future. It is sprinting, and using nuclear power. NASA this week unveiled a sweeping set of initiatives at its recent “Ignition” event, doubling down on its ambitions to return Americans to the Moon — and this time, to stay.​ At the heart of the announcement is an accelerated Artemis program. NASA aims to land astronauts on the lunar surface by 2027, with missions la...