Document type: Article Practice area: Technology — Aerospace Jurisdiction: United States (federal) and international Last reviewed: 5 September 2026

There is no space regulator

A company that wants to build and fly a satellite expects to find an agency that licenses satellites. There is not one.

Instead there are four regimes, administered by four different parts of the government, on four different timelines, with four different sets of counsel who mostly do not talk to each other:

  • The Federal Aviation Administration licenses the launch and the reentry — the act of putting the thing up and, if applicable, bringing it back.
  • The Federal Communications Commission licenses the transmission — every radio signal to or from the spacecraft, and increasingly the orbital debris plan that goes with it.
  • The Department of Commerce, through NOAA, licenses remote sensing — operating a private system that images the Earth.
  • The Departments of State and Commerce control the export of the hardware, the technical data, and the conversations about them.

Add to that the possibility of an FAA airspace or airport interaction, an FCC earth station authorization for each ground site, foreign regulatory approvals wherever the ground stations sit, and — underneath everything — a set of treaty obligations the United States has undertaken and discharges through these licenses.

A first-time operator that budgets six months for "the license" will discover that the FCC application alone can take longer than that, that the launch license belongs to the launch provider rather than to it, and that the export analysis needed to happen before the first engineering conversation with a foreign supplier, which was eleven months ago.

Auravent Orbital

Auravent Orbital is a 90-person company in Long Beach building a constellation of twelve small satellites carrying a hyperspectral imaging payload for agricultural monitoring. Yumi Castellanos-Okafor is the general counsel — the company's first lawyer, hired at Series B. Anders Bekele-Thorne is the chief executive and an engineer who has, by his own account, "never met a regulation he understood on the first reading."

Auravent will not launch its own rockets. It will buy a rideshare slot from Meridian Ascent, a launch provider. That single fact resolves one of the four regimes and complicates another.

Regime one: the launch license belongs to the launch provider

The Commercial Space Launch Act, now codified at 51 U.S.C. §§ 50901–50923, makes it unlawful for a United States citizen to launch a launch vehicle, or to operate a launch or reentry site, without a license or permit from the Secretary of Transportation, acting through the FAA. Section 50904 sets out the restrictions; § 50905 governs applications and the conditions the Secretary may impose; § 50908 governs the effective period, modification, suspension, and revocation of licenses.

The regulatory framework sits at 14 C.F.R. Part 450, which consolidated what had been separate launch, reentry, and vehicle-specific regimes into a single performance-based licensing structure. A Part 450 license addresses public safety through quantitative risk criteria — collective and individual risk thresholds for the public, hazard analyses, flight safety systems, and flight abort rules — rather than by prescribing a design.

For a payload customer like Auravent, three points matter.

You do not hold the launch license. Meridian Ascent does. Auravent's exposure runs through its contract with Meridian, not through its own FAA authorization.

But your payload is reviewed. The FAA conducts a payload review as part of the licensing process, determining whether the launch of a proposed payload would jeopardize public health and safety, safety of property, United States national security or foreign policy interests, or international obligations. A payload that another agency licenses — an FCC-authorized communications satellite, a NOAA-licensed remote sensing system — is generally addressed through that agency's authorization. A payload that no agency licenses goes through a payload review on its own, and that is where novel missions encounter the "mission authorization" gap: activities in space that no existing statute clearly covers, which the United States must nonetheless authorize and continuously supervise to satisfy its treaty obligations.

Your schedule depends on someone else's license. A launch provider whose license is delayed, modified, or suspended delays you, and your contract should say what happens then.

Regime two: financial responsibility, cross-waivers, and the indemnification tier

This is the most distinctive feature of American space law, and it is elegant once you see the structure.

Section 50914 requires a licensee to obtain liability insurance or demonstrate financial responsibility in an amount determined by the Secretary to compensate for the maximum probable loss from claims by a third party for death, bodily injury, or property damage resulting from the licensed activity — and, separately, for claims by the United States Government for damage to government property. The amounts are subject to statutory caps and are determined by a maximum probable loss analysis conducted by the FAA for each mission.

Section 50915 then provides the second tier: for successful claims exceeding the required insurance, the Secretary may pay, subject to appropriation, up to a statutory ceiling above the insured amount. Above that, liability returns to the licensee.

And § 50914 requires a reciprocal waiver of claims — the licensee, its contractors and subcontractors, its customers, and the customers' contractors and subcontractors, and the United States, each waive claims against the others for property damage and for employee injuries sustained in connection with the licensed activity. This is the cross-waiver, and it is the single most important commercial term in the space industry.

What the cross-waiver means in practice. If Meridian's rocket fails and Auravent's twelve satellites are destroyed, Auravent has no claim against Meridian for the loss of its satellites. Not a limited claim — no claim. Each party bears its own property loss and insures it or does not. The waiver flows down and flows across, binding customers and contractors at every tier.

The consequences for a payload customer are immediate. Your satellite is uninsured unless you insure it. Launch insurance is a real market with real premiums, typically a meaningful percentage of insured value, and the decision whether to buy it is a capital decision rather than a legal one. And your contract with the launch provider will not give you a remedy for launch failure, because the statute requires that it not.

The remedy that does exist is commercial: a reflight guarantee or a launch credit. Negotiate that term. It is what a launch failure actually buys you.

Regime three: the FCC, which is where the schedule really lives

Section 301 of the Communications Act, 47 U.S.C. § 301, prohibits the use or operation of any apparatus for the transmission of energy, communications, or signals by radio except under a license. Section 303 sets out the Commission's powers, § 307 its licensing authority, and § 309 the application procedure including the public notice and petition-to-deny process that makes satellite licensing slower than applicants expect.

The substantive rules are at 47 C.F.R. Part 25, governing satellite communications. There is a streamlined process for qualifying small satellites with limited operational characteristics — short mission duration, low orbit, small size, limited propulsion or deployment — which carries a lower fee and a faster shot clock but which many constellations do not qualify for.

What a satellite applicant has to demonstrate:

  • Frequency assignment and coordination. Which bands, for uplink, downlink, and telemetry, tracking and command. Whether the use is consistent with the allocation table. What interference analysis supports it.
  • Orbital parameters, and a plan the Commission can evaluate.
  • Orbital debris mitigation, which has become the substantive heart of the application.
  • Earth station authorizations for each ground site, which is a separate application track.
  • Legal, technical, and financial qualifications.

And the international layer. Radio frequency assignments and, for geostationary systems, orbital slots are coordinated internationally through the International Telecommunication Union, and a United States applicant reaches that process through the FCC, which files on the applicant's behalf. The ITU process has its own timelines, bringing-into-use deadlines, and coordination obligations with other administrations, and it runs in parallel with — not after — the domestic process. Applicants who treat the ITU filing as a formality discover late that a coordination obligation constrains their operations.

Practical scheduling advice for a company like Auravent: the FCC application is the long pole, it should be filed before the spacecraft design is frozen so that the design can accommodate what the license requires, and it needs specialist communications counsel who does this work regularly. General corporate counsel will not get a Part 25 application through efficiently.

Regime four: remote sensing, if you point a camera at Earth

Operating a private remote sensing space system requires a license from the Secretary of Commerce under 51 U.S.C. § 60121, with conditions of operation set out at § 60122 and implementing regulations at 15 C.F.R. Part 960.

The modern framework sorts systems into tiers based on whether the data the system can produce is already available from other sources — domestic, foreign, or otherwise. Tier 1 systems produce data substantially available from sources outside any government's control and carry the lightest conditions. Tier 2 systems produce data available only from other United States licensees. Tier 3 systems produce data not available from anyone, and carry conditions that can be tailored to the specific capability.

What has changed, and why it matters commercially. The framework moved from a posture in which conditions were the default toward one in which conditions must be justified by reference to what is already obtainable elsewhere, with temporary conditions subject to review. That shift materially improved the position of capability-leading operators, who previously found their most valuable capabilities constrained by conditions that competitors abroad did not face.

What the statute still preserves. Section 60122 contains the conditions of operation, including the requirement to operate consistent with national security concerns, foreign policy and international obligations of the United States — the statutory hook for what the industry has long called shutter control, the authority to limit collection or dissemination during specified periods over specified areas. Operators should understand that the authority exists, that its exercise is bounded by procedural requirements, and that the license will contain the conditions that make it operable.

For Auravent, whose hyperspectral instrument produces data with agricultural applications and no obvious sensitive analogue, the analysis was straightforward and the license was not the schedule driver. For an operator flying a novel capability — very high resolution, non-Earth imaging, radar, or a sensing modality nobody has commercialized — this regime becomes the hard one.

Regime five: export control, which should have been first

Every hardware element, every technical drawing, every design conversation with a foreign national — including one sitting in your own office — is potentially controlled.

The two lists. The Arms Export Control Act, 22 U.S.C. § 2778, authorizes the President to control the export and import of defense articles and services, implemented through the International Traffic in Arms Regulations and the United States Munitions List. Separately, the Export Administration Regulations administered by the Department of Commerce control dual-use items on the Commerce Control List, with satellite and spacecraft items concentrated in the "500 series" entries at 15 C.F.R. Part 774.

The 2014 transition matters enormously and is still misunderstood. For years, essentially all satellites and satellite components were on the Munitions List regardless of sophistication, which imposed a heavy compliance burden on commercial operators and pushed foreign manufacturers to design American components out of their systems. Reform moved many commercial satellites, spacecraft, and related components to the Commerce Control List, while retaining the most sensitive items — certain remote sensing, space-qualified radiation-hardened items, and specified military capabilities — under ITAR.

The consequence for a company like Auravent is that the analysis is now item-by-item and capability-by-capability rather than categorical. Some subsystems are ITAR-controlled; more are EAR-controlled; the classification of each must be determined and documented. Assuming everything is ITAR is expensive and slows engineering; assuming nothing is ITAR is a criminal exposure.

The traps that catch space companies specifically:

Deemed exports. Releasing controlled technical data to a foreign national inside the United States is an export to that person's country. A brilliant engineer on a visa, in your own conference room, looking at a controlled drawing, is an export event. Space companies hire internationally and this is the most common violation.

Foreign launch providers and foreign ground stations. Integrating your spacecraft with a foreign launch vehicle involves technical exchange that requires authorization — historically a Technical Assistance Agreement under ITAR, and the analogous analysis under the EAR for controlled items. Ground stations abroad involve export of equipment and often of technical data.

Foreign investors and board members. Access to controlled technical data by a foreign person on the board or in a diligence data room is an export. This intersects with foreign investment review, which for critical technologies including certain space capabilities can reach non-controlling investments.

The instruction: do the export analysis before the first engineering conversation with any foreign party, and build an internal control program with classification records, access controls by nationality, and a technology control plan. Companies that do this at Series C discover violations that occurred at seed.

Orbital debris: from courtesy to licensing gate

For most of the space age, debris mitigation was voluntary best practice. It is now a licensing requirement with teeth, and it is the substantive core of a modern FCC satellite application.

What an applicant must address:

Debris release. A commitment to release no operational debris — no lens caps, no separation hardware, no deliberate breakups.

Collision risk assessment, both at deployment and over the mission, including the probability of collision with large objects and the plan for conjunction assessment and avoidance maneuvers.

Maneuverability. Whether the spacecraft can maneuver, with what propulsion, and how the operator will respond to a conjunction warning. A non-maneuverable satellite in a congested shell is an increasingly hard sell.

Post-mission disposal. The plan for removing the spacecraft from orbit at end of mission. The Commission has moved to a five-year post-mission disposal expectation for low Earth orbit spacecraft, materially tightening the previous twenty-five-year guideline. For a satellite in a high LEO shell without propulsion, that is a design constraint, not a paperwork item — it drives orbital altitude selection, ballistic coefficient, and whether a deorbit device is carried.

Casualty risk on reentry, where components may survive to the ground, assessed against a probability threshold.

Spacecraft disposal reliability, including the probability that the disposal system works, which for a constellation is multiplied across every satellite.

Space situational awareness and coordination. The operator's arrangements for receiving conjunction data, its screening thresholds, its maneuver decision process, and how another operator reaches it at three in the morning. Civil space traffic coordination has been moving toward a Commerce Department civil capability, and operators should expect data-sharing and coordination obligations to become more formal rather than less.

Why this matters commercially. Debris requirements are now design requirements. A company that completes its spacecraft design and then applies for a license will find that its altitude, its propulsion decision, and its end-of-life plan are being evaluated against criteria it did not design to. File the application early enough that the license shapes the design, which is the reverse of how most companies sequence it.

The international layer

The domestic licensing regimes exist in substantial part to discharge treaty obligations, and understanding that explains features that otherwise look arbitrary.

The Outer Space Treaty establishes that States Parties bear international responsibility for national activities in outer space, including activities of non-governmental entities, and that such activities require authorization and continuing supervision by the appropriate State Party. That single sentence is why the United States licenses commercial space activity at all, and why the "mission authorization gap" — novel activities no existing statute clearly covers — is a genuine problem rather than a theoretical one. It also provides that a State on whose registry an object is carried retains jurisdiction and control over that object and its personnel.

The Liability Convention elaborates the launching State's liability: absolute liability for damage caused by a space object on the surface of the Earth or to aircraft in flight, and fault-based liability for damage caused elsewhere than on the surface — that is, in space, to another space object. "Launching State" is defined broadly and can include the State that launches, procures the launch, or from whose territory or facility the launch occurs, which means more than one State can be liable for a single object.

The Registration Convention requires launching States to register space objects and furnish specified information to the United Nations.

Section 50919 addresses the relationship of the domestic statute to other executive agencies, laws, and international obligations, and the licensing agencies' conditions are where those obligations become operative on a private operator.

What this means for a private company. You do not have obligations under these treaties; States do. But the State's obligations are imposed on you through your license conditions, and the State's exposure to liability is the reason your license contains indemnification and financial responsibility requirements. When an agency asks a question that seems disconnected from public safety in the United States, it is usually discharging a treaty obligation.

Allocating risk in the commercial documents

The launch services agreement. The cross-waiver required by § 50914 is not negotiable in substance, so negotiate everything around it:

  • Reflight or credit on failure, and the conditions and timing.
  • Schedule. Launch dates move. Define the accommodation for delay, the customer's rights on extended delay, and what happens if the provider's license is delayed, modified, or suspended under § 50908.
  • Manifest priority on a rideshare, and what happens if the primary payload slips.
  • Orbit insertion accuracy and the remedy for a poor insertion, which is a different failure from a loss.
  • Integration, access, and the technical exchange plan — with the export authorizations identified.
  • Insurance obligations of each party, and evidence of coverage.
  • Flow-down of the cross-waiver to your own contractors and customers, which the statute contemplates and your contracts must actually implement.

Hosted payload and rideshare agreements add a further layer: the host's control over the mission, the payload's dependence on the host's power, pointing, and downlink, and what happens when the host's mission priorities diverge from yours.

Data and imagery agreements for a remote sensing operator raise their own set: resolution and revisit commitments, tasking priority, latency, license scope for derived products, restrictions inherited from the operator's own license conditions, government purpose rights where a government customer is involved, and what happens to previously delivered data if a license condition changes.

Insurance, across the whole program: pre-launch, launch, in-orbit, third-party liability, and — increasingly — coverage questions around collision liability where fault must be established under the Liability Convention framework.

Ground segment, spectrum in practice, and the parts nobody budgets

The spacecraft gets the attention. The ground segment generates most of the recurring regulatory work.

Every earth station needs its own authorization. A satellite license does not authorize the ground stations that talk to it. Each site requires an FCC earth station authorization — with frequency coordination against terrestrial services, site-specific interference analysis, and antenna characteristics — and each is a separate application on its own timeline. Operators who plan a global ground network discover that the domestic sites are the easy ones.

Foreign ground stations multiply the problem. A station in another country requires that country's authorization, obtained under that country's law, usually through a local entity or a local partner. It also involves exporting equipment and technical data, which returns you to 22 U.S.C. § 2778 and the Commerce controls. And "ground station as a service" providers, which many small operators now use, do not relieve the operator of responsibility for the authorizations underlying the service — verify what the provider actually holds.

Spectrum is scarcer than the frequency chart suggests. The bands attractive for small satellite operations are congested, coordination against incumbent terrestrial and satellite services is genuinely constraining, and the analysis that supports an application is technical work performed by specialists. Operators who select a band because their radio vendor supports it, rather than because a coordination analysis supports it, restart the application.

Bringing into use. International frequency assignments carry deadlines for bringing the assignment into actual use, and an assignment not brought into use within the period lapses. For a constellation whose launch slips, this becomes a real constraint on the paper rights the company thought it had secured.

Then the recurring obligations. Annual reports. Modification applications for any change to orbital parameters, frequencies, or spacecraft characteristics — and "any change" is broader than operators assume. License renewal. Conjunction reporting arrangements. Debris mitigation compliance. Anomaly and failure reporting. Deorbit confirmation at end of life.

Budget a person for this. A constellation operator's regulatory obligations are a continuous function, not a launch-phase project, and the operators who staff for it are the ones whose modification applications do not sit for eight months.

Human spaceflight, briefly

If people are aboard, a further layer applies and its structure is unusual enough to note.

The regulatory posture has been deliberately restrained. Congress limited the FAA's authority to issue regulations governing the safety of spaceflight participants — the occupants who are not crew — for a defined period, on the theory that a nascent industry should be permitted to learn before design standards were prescribed. That learning period has been extended repeatedly and its status is a live legislative question; confirm where it stands before advising.

What does apply. An operator must inform each spaceflight participant, in writing, of the risks of the launch and reentry, including the safety record of the launch or reentry vehicle type, and must inform them that the United States Government has not certified the vehicle as safe for carrying crew or participants. Participants must provide written informed consent. Crew must meet qualification and training requirements, and the operator must implement measures to protect the safety of the public, which was never subject to the learning-period restraint.

Informed consent is not a complete defense. It is a statutory requirement and it is the foundation of the operator's liability position, but the enforceability of a waiver of liability for gross negligence or willful misconduct varies by state law, and the choice of law and forum provisions in participant agreements are doing significant work. Several states have enacted spaceflight liability statutes providing limited immunity where statutory warnings are given; those statutes differ in scope and in what they preserve.

Insurance and financial responsibility under 51 U.S.C. § 50914 address third-party and government property claims. Participant injury is a different exposure, and the cross-waiver structure does not resolve it in the way it resolves property loss between commercial parties.

Practical advice. Draft the informed consent document to be read and understood, not to be defensible — a document a participant plainly understood is worth more than one a court might enforce. Record the briefing. Train the people who deliver it. And treat the medical screening, training, and participant selection criteria as legal documents, because after an incident they will be.

Selling to the government, which most space companies do

Very few space companies survive on commercial revenue alone. Government customers change the legal picture in ways that are worth knowing before the first contract.

Data rights are the central issue. A government contract's data rights clauses determine what the government may do with the technical data and software you deliver, and the categories — unlimited rights, government purpose rights, limited rights, restricted rights, and specially negotiated licenses — turn largely on who paid for the development. Technology developed exclusively at private expense generally carries limited or restricted rights; technology developed with government funding carries broader rights. The practical instruction is to maintain contemporaneous records of what was developed at private expense, because the question will be asked years later and the burden will be yours. Mark deliverables correctly and consistently; unmarked or incorrectly marked deliverables can lose protection.

Patent rights under government funding. Federally funded inventions carry disclosure obligations, election-of-title deadlines, a government license, and United States manufacturing preferences. Missing an election deadline can forfeit title. Build the compliance calendar into the patent docket, not into the contract file.

Other transaction agreements are widely used for space and prototype work and are not standard procurement contracts. Their data rights, intellectual property, and dispute provisions are negotiated rather than prescribed, which is an opportunity and a trap — there is no default protecting you.

Cost accounting and compliance. Above defined thresholds, cost accounting standards, business systems requirements, and audit rights attach. A company transitioning from commercial-only to significant government revenue needs accounting systems it does not currently have, and discovering that during an audit is expensive.

Facility and personnel clearances take a long time and cannot be accelerated by wanting them. Start early if the work will require them.

Foreign ownership, control, or influence. Foreign investment — including non-controlling investment — can complicate clearances and can trigger foreign investment review for critical technologies, which reach certain space capabilities. Space companies raise money internationally; the two facts collide regularly, and the mitigation agreements available are workable but restrictive.

And the protest exposure runs both ways. Awards you win can be protested; awards you lose can be protested by you. Both are bounded by short deadlines that begin before you know why you lost.

The activities the statutes do not clearly cover

The four regimes above license launch, transmission, imaging, and export. A growing set of commercial activities fits none of them cleanly, and the resulting gap is a live policy problem and a practical obstacle for the companies affected.

In-orbit servicing, assembly, and manufacturing. A spacecraft that approaches, docks with, refuels, repairs, or relocates another spacecraft is doing something no statute specifically authorizes. The FCC licenses its transmissions. The FAA licenses its launch. Nobody licenses the servicing, and yet the Outer Space Treaty requires the United States to authorize and continuously supervise it. In practice these missions have been accommodated through payload review conditions and license conditions assembled from the available authorities, which works but does not scale.

Active debris removal raises the same authorization question plus a harder one: the object being removed belongs to someone, and under the Outer Space Treaty the State of registry retains jurisdiction and control over it. Removing another State's object without consent is not a technical problem; it is an international law problem.

Commercial space stations and habitats, particularly those carrying people, raise human spaceflight participant questions, occupational safety questions, and — where research or manufacturing occurs — regulatory questions that terrestrial agencies have never applied off-planet.

Lunar and deep space activities, including resource extraction. United States law recognizes property rights in resources obtained by United States citizens, subject to international obligations. What that means in practice — how a claim is recognized, how conflicting operations are deconflicted, whether an operator can exclude others from a site — is unresolved, and the international position is contested.

Point-to-point suborbital transportation of cargo or passengers sits awkwardly between launch licensing under 51 U.S.C. § 50904 and aviation certification under 49 U.S.C. § 44701, and the boundary has real consequences for what standards apply.

Advice for a company in one of these categories. Engage the agencies early and jointly rather than sequentially — a pre-application meeting with the FAA, the FCC, and the relevant Commerce components in the same room saves months. Expect to be regulated by license condition rather than by rule, which means the conditions are negotiable and worth negotiating carefully, because they will become the template for your competitors. Document the treaty analysis yourself; the agency will be discharging obligations it may not articulate, and an operator who understands them is a far more effective counterparty. And budget for the possibility that the answer changes: this is an area where legislation and rulemaking are actively in motion, and an authorization structure assembled in 2026 may look different in 2029.

How Auravent's twenty-two months actually went

Castellanos-Okafor built the schedule backwards from the launch date, and the sequence is instructive because it is not the sequence the company would have chosen.

Month 1 — Export control, before anything else. A classification exercise across every subsystem: which items are ITAR-controlled under the Munitions List, which are EAR-controlled in the 500 series at 15 C.F.R. Part 774, and which are uncontrolled. The exercise found two problems. A German optics supplier had received drawings eight months earlier that should have been authorized. And four engineers on visas had unrestricted access to a repository containing controlled technical data — deemed exports occurring daily, to three countries, for over a year.

Auravent filed voluntary disclosures, implemented a technology control plan with access controls by nationality, and trained the engineering organization. Bekele-Thorne's reaction on being told was that this was "an absurd rule about people who work here," which is the correct reaction and does not change the law. The disclosures were resolved without penalty, which is the ordinary outcome for a company that self-reports promptly and fixes the program.

Months 2–4 — The FCC application. Filed early, deliberately, before the spacecraft design froze. Specialist communications counsel. Frequency selection and interference analysis, orbital parameters, and — the substantive core — the orbital debris showing.

Month 4 — The design change the license forced. The debris analysis showed that Auravent's planned 620-kilometer orbit, with no propulsion, produced a natural decay time far beyond the five-year post-mission disposal expectation. The options were a lower orbit, which cost revisit performance; a drag device, which cost mass and added a deployment failure mode; or propulsion, which cost mass, money, and a further year of qualification. Auravent lowered the orbit and added a drag sail.

This is the point of the whole story. Had the application been filed after the design freeze, the choice would have been between an expensive redesign and an unlicensable spacecraft. Filing early converted a crisis into a trade study.

Months 3–7 — Remote sensing license. Comparatively smooth. Hyperspectral agricultural data with widely available analogues; light conditions; not the schedule driver.

Months 6–9 — Launch services agreement with Meridian Ascent. The cross-waiver was explained to the board three times before it was believed. The negotiated terms were a reflight credit, manifest priority protections on the rideshare, an orbit insertion accuracy remedy, and a schedule accommodation with a walk-away right after extended delay. Auravent bought launch insurance for the first two satellites and self-insured the rest — a capital decision the chief financial officer made, correctly, as a portfolio question.

Months 9–20 — Build, integration, ground station authorizations, ITU coordination running in parallel, and an ongoing conjunction assessment arrangement negotiated before launch rather than after.

Month 22 — Launch.

What Castellanos-Okafor would tell the next general counsel in her position: run export control first and treat it as an operating program rather than a filing; file the FCC application before the design freezes; explain the cross-waiver to the board early and in writing; and accept that the regulatory schedule is the program schedule, because in this industry it is.

What to tell the client

One: there is no space regulator, and the four regimes run on different clocks. Start them in parallel and start the export analysis first.

Two: the FCC application is the long pole, and it should be filed before the design freezes, because debris and coordination requirements are design requirements.

Three: you cannot sue the launch provider if the rocket fails. The cross-waiver in § 50914 forecloses it. Insure the spacecraft or accept the loss, and negotiate a reflight.

Four: the financial responsibility structure is a three-tier system — required insurance for maximum probable loss, a government indemnification tier under § 50915 subject to appropriation, and the licensee above that.

Five: orbital debris is now a gate, not a courtesy. Five-year post-mission disposal in low Earth orbit changes altitude and propulsion decisions.

Six: export control violations happen in your own conference room. Deemed exports to foreign nationals on your own staff are the most common failure in this industry, and they are criminal.

Seven: your license conditions exist because the United States has treaty obligations. Understanding that turns a list of arbitrary-seeming requirements into a coherent system, and it makes the conversation with the agency a great deal more productive.

Related documents

This article is general information, not legal advice, and does not create an attorney-client relationship.