A new trade association representing non-geostationary satellite operators launched in Washington this week without the participation of the company that dominates the segment it claims to represent. SpaceConnect Association, led by former National Telecommunications and Information Administration head David Redl, opened its doors with Amazon, Globalstar, Iridium and Telesat as founding members — and a conspicuous absence where SpaceX should be.
The group’s stated mission is straightforward: give NGSO operators a dedicated voice on licensing rules, spectrum access and the upcoming World Radiocommunication Conference. The political reality is more complicated. SpaceX operates more than 10,000 satellites in non-geostationary orbit — about 22 times the combined fleets of every SpaceConnect member. A trade association without it is, by any honest measure, a coalition of everyone else.
The math problem at the center of SpaceConnect
Trade associations work by aggregating member interests into a single regulatory voice. That arithmetic breaks down when one company in a segment outweighs all others combined by more than an order of magnitude.
Redl addressed the imbalance at a media briefing. SpaceConnect, he said, represents a market segment where SpaceX is a major player but by no means the only one. The framing is diplomatic. It is also an acknowledgment that the association exists, in part, because the smaller players believe their interests diverge from SpaceX’s — and that the broader Satellite Industry Association, which spans geostationary and NGSO operators alike and likewise counts SpaceX as a non-member, does not give those interests a dedicated voice.
The divergence is real. NGSO operators face distinct regulatory questions around licensing timelines, satellite power limits and spectrum sharing that don’t map neatly onto the priorities of legacy GEO operators. Redl framed NGSO priorities around competition and open market access, which he argued differ from those of the established geostationary operators that the older trade groups were built to serve.
Who is at the table
The founding members reflect a particular slice of the NGSO market. Amazon is building Project Kuiper, now marketed as Amazon Leo, a constellation of more than 3,200 planned satellites. Iridium operates a global voice and data network. Globalstar provides messaging services and supports basic space-enabled features on Apple’s latest iPhones. Telesat is preparing to launch its NGSO broadband constellation, Lightspeed — satellites the company plans to put into orbit, in a piece of irony that captures the awkwardness of the moment, aboard SpaceX rockets next year.
The deployment gap underlines the point. Amazon has roughly 370 of its planned satellites in orbit and intends to begin commercial broadband service later this year; Telesat’s broadband fleet is still on the ground. Measured against a SpaceX constellation already past 10,000, every founding member is, in orbital terms, still at the starting line.
Julie Kearney, who became the first chief of the Federal Communications Commission’s Space Bureau before joining DLA Piper in 2025, serves as general counsel. In the association’s announcement, Kearney emphasized that SpaceConnect would work to advance innovation-friendly policies while promoting safe and responsible operations in low Earth orbit.
The personnel choices are revealing. Redl ran NTIA during the first Trump administration. Kearney built the FCC’s Space Bureau from scratch. Both bring institutional memory of how spectrum and licensing fights actually get won in Washington. SpaceConnect is staffing for a regulatory war, not a press release.
What the fight is about
The technical disputes that motivated SpaceConnect’s formation are dense, but the stakes are concrete. One flashpoint is equivalent power-flux density, the standard governing how much power NGSO satellites can beam down without interfering with geostationary networks. The rules date to the late 1990s, and by the FCC’s own account they forced newer constellations to overprotect legacy operators.
That fight has already partly resolved. On April 30, 2026, the commission voted to replace the fixed EPFD limits with a performance-based framework, with the new rules taking effect in July. The contest now turns on implementation: how the protected geostationary reference links are defined, whether aggregate interference from multiple NGSO systems gets capped, and how the new good-faith coordination obligations play out for operators with very different fleet sizes.
Spectrum access is the other front. The World Radiocommunication Conference, held under the auspices of the International Telecommunication Union, sets the global rules that determine which frequencies satellite operators can use and under what conditions. Decisions made there cascade into national licensing regimes for years afterward. NGSO operators want updated licensing processes that reflect the speed at which constellations are now deployed — Amazon’s planned 3,200-plus satellites and Telesat’s constellation are modest compared with what SpaceX has already put up.
And the night sky itself has become a regulatory variable. Astronomers have warned for years that mega-constellations interfere with both optical and radio observations. As one space.com columnist recently put it, the mega-constellation era has become a tragedy for astrophotographers and radio astronomers alike, with more than 10,000 Starlinks already streaking long exposures and disrupting wide-field surveys like the one underway at the Rubin Observatory.
The SpaceX question
SpaceConnect says it remains open to SpaceX joining. That is the polite line. The structural reality is that SpaceX has little incentive to participate in an association where it would be one vote among several while contributing the overwhelming majority of the segment’s satellites, revenue and lobbying weight.
SpaceX has historically preferred to advocate for itself directly, and its market position makes that viable. When the company went public on the Nasdaq in June 2026 at a valuation near $1.77 trillion, it became one of the most valuable companies on the market, with a balance sheet and political reach few trade groups could match. When a single company can hire its own former regulators, fund its own studies and command direct meetings with FCC commissioners, the marginal value of a trade-association membership is small.
That changes the function of SpaceConnect. The group is less a unified industry voice than a counterweight — an institutional structure through which the rest of the NGSO field can coordinate positions that may run against SpaceX’s preferred outcomes.
A familiar pattern in regulated industries
The dynamic is not new. When one firm dominates a regulated segment, smaller competitors often form associations specifically to balance regulatory influence. The telecommunications industry saw this in the long-distance era, when smaller carriers organized against AT&T. The cloud computing market has seen similar coalitions form around interoperability and data portability rules.
What makes the satellite case distinct is the speed of change. Five years ago, the NGSO segment was a handful of legacy operators with modest fleets. Today it is a market headed toward tens of thousands of active spacecraft, with rules still being written about everything from collision avoidance to spectrum coordination to end-of-life disposal. The operators that didn’t get to the orbital starting line first now face a regulatory environment increasingly shaped by the one that did.
This is the context in which SpaceConnect makes sense. Its members are not trying to slow SpaceX down. They are trying to ensure that the rules being written for the next decade don’t lock in the advantages of the company that moved first. That includes everything from how new constellations get licensed to how spectrum gets allocated to whether operators face uniform power limits or tiered ones based on fleet size.
What to watch
The first real test will come at the 2027 World Radiocommunication Conference and in the FCC’s follow-on proceedings on how the new spectrum-sharing framework is implemented. If SpaceConnect can produce coordinated technical filings and present a unified position from Amazon, Iridium, Globalstar and Telesat, it will have established itself as a meaningful regulatory voice. If its members file separately or contradict each other, the association will struggle to justify its existence.
The broader question is whether the NGSO segment is converging or fragmenting. Operators are developing more integrated orbital architectures that blend communications and earth observation functions. That convergence could either strengthen the case for a unified NGSO voice or expose deeper splits between operators with different business models.
For now, SpaceConnect has done what new trade associations do: hired credible leadership, announced a charter, identified its battlegrounds. Whether it becomes a genuine policy force or a footnote in the SpaceX era depends on questions that won’t be answered in press releases. They will be answered in spectrum filings, FCC dockets and ITU working groups over the next several years — slowly, technically and largely out of public view.
