Regulators / Agencies

Ofcom is the UK’s communications regulator, created in 2003 by merging several older regulatory bodies into one super-bureaucracy. Its remit covers television, radio, fixed and mobile telecoms, spectrum management, and,…

The German Aerospace Center, better known by its German acronym DLR (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt), is not a company but a state research and development organization. It operates…

The UK Space Agency is not a commercial operator or a manufacturer but a funding and policy body. It was created in 2010 to consolidate the UK’s civil space programs,…

The Indian Space Research Organisation, ISRO, is not a commercial operator in the usual sense but a state agency tasked with giving India independent space capability. It sits under the…

SpaceRISE is Brussels’ latest attempt to prove Europe can do satellites without outsourcing its sovereignty to Elon, Jeff, or whatever Russian supplier hasn’t been sanctioned yet. Officially it’s a “public-private…

The ITU is the FCC’s older, slower, more ceremonial cousin, the one that wears a suit to family dinners and insists on being called by its full title: the International…

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…

NASA is the space agency everyone still treats like a swashbuckling pioneer, when in reality it has become the world’s most expensive project management office. The Apollo era gave it…

The European Space Agency (ESA) is less a space agency than a therapy circle for European ministries. On paper it’s about science, exploration, and satellite technology. In practice it’s a…