February 6, 2021

SpaceX Plans Starlink Phone Service, Emergency Backup, and Low-Income Access (Source: Ars Technica)
A new SpaceX filing outlines plans for Starlink to offer phone service, emergency backup for voice calls, and cheaper plans for people with low incomes through the government's Lifeline program. The details are in Starlink's FCC petition for designation as an Eligible Telecommunications Carrier (ETC) under the Communications Act. SpaceX said it needs that legal designation in some of the states where it won government funding to deploy broadband in unserved areas. The ETC designation is also needed to get reimbursement from the FCC's Lifeline program for offering discounts on telecom service to people with low incomes.

Starlink is in beta and costs $99 per month, plus a one-time fee of $499 for the user terminal, mounting tripod, and router. As we noted yesterday, the SpaceX filing also says Starlink now has over 10,000 users in the US and abroad. SpaceX should have capacity for several million customers in the US—the company has permission to deploy up to 1 million user terminals (i.e. satellite dishes) and is seeking FCC permission to raise the maximum-deployment level to 5 million user terminals.

While the Starlink beta only includes broadband, SpaceX said it will eventually sell VoIP service that includes "(a) voice-grade access to the public switched telephone network ('PSTN') or its functional equivalent; (b) minutes of use for local service provided at no additional charge to end users; (c) access to emergency services; and (d) toll limitation services to qualifying low-income consumers." (2/5)

Amazon Responds to Elon Musk’s Accusations of Impeding SpaceX’s Starlink Satellite Internet Plans (Source: CNBC)
Amazon’s satellite internet project on Thursday clarified its position in response to recent accusations from Elon Musk and SpaceX that Jeff Bezos’ company is attempting to “stifle competition” in the sector. SpaceX’s Starlink and Amazon’s Kuiper are working to build space-based internet networks by launching thousands of satellites into orbit. Amazon says the FCC should consider Starlink as a “newly designed system” and include it in a broader regulatory processing round that was open when SpaceX submitted a modification request last year. (2/5)

Will Jeff Bezos’s Space Venture Help Solve the Challenges of Climate Change? (Source: The National)
Certainly the weirdest aspects of the capitalist journey of Jeff Bezos are his stated reasons for wanting to push forward into outer space (which he will focus on in his new, post-Amazon role). Let’s avoid any B movie-like rivalry with spacefaring moguls like Elon Musk. Instead, Bezos’s space philosophy seems to be only an extension of his business plan for “consumer ecstasy”. In a May 2019 speech, Bezos predicted that our unlimited demand for energy – powering our health and medicine, our entertainments, our transportation – will hit up against the “finite resources” of the planet.

According to Bezos we must get energy production out and off a choking Earth (I assume it’ll all be beamed and carted down somehow). Therefore we need space wheels, planetary colonies, asteroid mining and sunlight arrays to crack open our solar-system resources. If we don’t, says Bezos with a shudder, “the answer is incredibly simple: rationing. That’s the path we would find ourselves on”, with generations of descendants living worse lives than us. “That’s a bad path,” he adds. (2/6)

NSC Memo May Spell End Of National Space Council (Source: Breaking Defense)
A new White House executive order appears to route all future national security space policy decisions through the National Security Council (NSC), in a move numerous experts and former officials say may signal a Biden administration decision to abandon the National Space Council. During the Trump administration, the re-vitalized National Space Council led by Vice President Mike Pence was prolific: issuing seven Space Policy Directives on issues ranging from commercial space traffic management (SPD-3) to protection of GPS (SPD-7).

While the new language in unclear, bets are weighing in that the Biden administration reverts to the model used by the Obama administration, which gave the NSC the lead for natsec space, and the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) the lead for civil space policy. Many experts and former officials say the most likely scenario is not for Biden to formally undo the National Space Council, but just to let it go dormant, as it was between 1993 and 2017.

In part, this is because neither Biden nor Vice President Kamala Harris have shown much  interest in space policy. That was brought home by White House spokesperson Jen Psaki’s joke on Wednesday that Biden cared about Space Force as much as he cared about Air Force One’s paint job — a joke that backfired and caused the White House to furiously backpedal yesterday to say that Space Force has the president’s full support. (2/5)

Private Chinese Company Launches Smart Suborbital Rocket (Source: Xinhua)
A new smart suborbital rocket developed by a private Chinese company was successfully launched from a site in northwest China on Friday, according to the company. The "Chongqing Liangjiang Star" OS-X6B, with a length of 9.4 meters, was launched at 5:05 p.m. It completed a flight time of about 580 seconds, reaching a maximum altitude of about 300 km, said OneSpace Technology Group Co.

The launch marks the first time that a private Chinese rocket company has realized controlled re-entry flight, human-in-the-loop space flight control, and (upper stage) redundant fault-tolerant control, according to OneSpace. It also completed the verification of a number of key technologies and obtained a large amount of real flight environment data. (2/6)

Two Exoplanet Families Redefine What Planetary Systems Can Look Like (Source: Science News)
Two tightly packed families of exoplanets are pushing the boundaries of what a planetary system can look like. New studies of the makeup of worlds orbiting two different stars show a wide range of planetary possibilities, all of them different from our solar system. “When we study multiplanet systems, there’s simply more information kept in these systems” than any single planet by itself, says geophysicist Caroline Dorn.

Dorn and colleagues studied an old favorite planetary system called TRAPPIST-1, which hosts seven Earth-sized planets orbiting a small dim star about 40 light-years away. Another team studied a recently identified system called TOI-178, which has at least six planets — three already known and three newly found — circling a bright, hot star roughly 200 light-years away. Both systems offer planetary scientists an advantage over the more than 3,000 other exoplanet families spotted to date: All seven planets in TRAPPIST-1 and all six in TOI-178 have well-known masses and radii. That means planetary scientists can figure out their densities, a clue to the planets’ composition. (2/5)

Three Countries are Due to Reach Mars in the Next Two Weeks (Source: The Verge)
A small fleet of spacecraft from the United Arab Emirates, China, and the United States will reach Mars this month after launching from Earth last year. The march to the Red Planet marks a marathon of firsts: it’s the UAE’s first foray into deep space, China’s first independent attempt to land on Mars, and NASA’s first shot at deploying a Martian helicopter.

The rare convoy of Mars-bound spacecraft launched off Earth in a slim, roughly two-month window last summer when Earth and Mars lined up just right in their orbits around the Sun. This planetary alignment only happens once every two years, and three countries took advantage of it in 2020, just as outer space reemerged as a playground for scientific discovery and displays of national power. (2/5)

NASA, Explain the Killing of Monkeys (Source: Toledo Blade)
Many animal lovers were shocked and appalled by the news made public recently that all 27 monkeys held at a NASA research facility were euthanized on a single day last year. Such a cold-hearted decision to kill off the entire group without making an effort to find a sanctuary for them in their final days has animal rights groups understandably outraged and elected officials wanting answers.

The animals were housed at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley and were part of a joint-care agreement with LifeSource BioMedical, a drug research company that leases space at the center. The Guardian obtained documents under the Freedom of Information Act that revealed the 27 aging primates — 21 of which had Parkinson’s disease — were euthanized with drugs on Feb. 2, 2020. (2/6)

The Innovation That Will Ensure U.S. Security In Space (Source: Aviation Week)
During the Cold War, it was not the U.S.’ superior weapons or soldiers that ultimately led to the Soviet Union’s capitulation. Historians record that the relative economic might of the U.S. ultimately brought the Cold War to a peaceful and conclusive end. Three decades later, the U.S. again finds itself at the dawn of what many have dubbed the “Second Space Race,” for which the U.S. ought to remain mindful of this lesson, lest it be used against us.

What then, are the best avenues for the U.S. to win this new near-peer space competition? They are the same ones that delivered victory in the last century: free markets, real economic growth and the productivity that often follows. This time, however, we must keep in mind that our rival is a keen student that has learned from our earlier successes—and Soviet failures.

The American response must not repeat the Cold War strategy of outspending our rival in government programs. Instead, the U.S. long game must put the commercial industry first: deliberately buy goods and services from our commercial domestic market, only providing government solutions when the commercial market cannot meet requirements. Unlike other military services, there are no real “weapons” in space. Much of what the government is developing for civil and national security space needs also exists as products or services in the commercial market. By encouraging the commercial industry to grow and not competing against it, the U.S. will secure a long-term strategy leading to unrivaled space leadership. (1/28)