The FCC is the part of the US government that makes or breaks space telecom ventures, usually with the grace of a DMV clerk and the power of a nuclear button. It hands out licenses for spectrum, orbital slots, landing rights, and generally decides whether a company’s grand satellite plans actually get to touch American soil. If you want to sell broadband from orbit to US customers, you don’t beg the market, you beg the FCC.

Historically the Commission has played both gatekeeper and cheerleader. It crushed Teledesic in the 90s by sitting on spectrum filings until the money ran dry, then spent the next two decades rubber-stamping GEO renewals while LEO broadband projects went bankrupt on schedule. Starlink broke that pattern by actually showing up with hardware and a launch cadence, and the FCC couldn’t ignore it. Suddenly those dusty “processing rounds” for non-GEO constellations started filling up again, with OneWeb, Telesat, Kuiper and a dozen speculative plays piling in.

The FCC’s rulings shape the battlefield. Give SpaceX spectrum priority, OneWeb screams. Allow Kuiper to slip in late, Starlink sues. Adjust debris-mitigation timelines, and suddenly half the filings are obsolete. Every tweak in Washington is worth billions in orbit. And unlike ESA or the ITU, the FCC doesn’t bother pretending it’s neutral. It’s a domestic regulator that makes decisions with one eye on US industry advantage.

The Commission itself is hardly some futuristic think tank. It’s a five-member body where partisan deadlock is routine, where commissioners spend as much time angling for future jobs as they do reading spectrum tables, and where lobbyists pour in with binders full of “technical comments” that are really business plans dressed up as physics. If you’ve ever wondered why Starlink moves fast while others crawl, the answer isn’t just rockets—it’s the way Musk’s lawyers feed filings to an FCC that likes winners and hates political embarrassment.

In short: the FCC doesn’t run satellites, but it decides who gets to. For companies, it’s not a regulator to “work with.” It’s a boss to appease.