SpaceX gets FCC license for 1 million satellite-broadband user terminals
SpaceX now licensed to deploy 1 million of what Musk calls “UFOs on a stick.” …
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SpaceX has received government approval to deploy up to 1 million user terminals in the United States for its Starlink satellite-broadband constellation.
SpaceX asked the Federal Communications Commission for the license in February 2019, and the FCC announced its approval in a public notice last week. The FCC approval is for “a blanket license for the operation of up to 1,000,000 fixed earth stations that will communicate with [SpaceX’s] non-geostationary orbit satellite system.” The license is good for 15 years.
As SpaceX’s application said, the earth stations are “user terminals [that] employ advanced phased-array beam-forming and digital-processing technologies to make highly efficient use of Ku-band spectrum resources by supporting highly directive, steered antenna beams that track the system’s low-Earth orbit satellites.”
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk described them in simpler terms at a satellite-industry conference a couple weeks ago, saying the user terminals “look like a UFO on a stick” and will have actuators that let them point themselves in the right direction.
“It’s very important that you don’t need a specialist to install it,” Musk said at the time. “The goal is that… there’s just two instructions, and they can be done in either order: point at sky, plug in.”
One million terminals would only cover a fraction of US homes, but SpaceX isn’t necessarily looking to sign up huge portions of the US population. Musk said at the conference that
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