AINEWS
The Sept. 30 vote would formalize an informal practice as SpaceX plans 100,000 more Starlink satellites and a proposed 1 million satellite orbital data center system.
The Federal Communications Commission will vote Sept. 30 to formalize, in regulation, an informal posture it has held for years: that satellite systems do not need environmental review under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the 1970 law that requires federal agencies to assess the ecological effects of major projects before approving them.
Chairman Brendan Carr announced the move Tuesday in a blog post framed as cutting "billions of dollars' worth of red tape". A senior FCC official told reporters the same day that the reforms would exempt not just satellites already in orbit but the ground infrastructure that supports them, the ground stations, antennas, and telemetry sites that would also be excluded from NEPA review.
The commission has historically not conducted environmental reviews of individual satellite licenses, but it has not written that exemption into its rules. The September 30 vote would change that. A formal exemption means future challenges to the practice would have to take on the regulation itself, not just a particular license.
The vote lands as the planned satellite population is rising by roughly an order of magnitude. SpaceX already operates more than 7,000 Starlink broadband satellites in low Earth orbit. The company has disclosed plans to add up to 100,000 more under its next-generation constellation, and to file for a separate system, Starmind, that would put up to 1 million data-center satellites in orbit. Starmind is described by the company as an orbital compute network; on a population basis, it is several times larger than every other constellation in the sky today combined.
The reform is being proposed against a record of specific, documented concerns that the new rule would not address. A 2022 Government Accountability Office report urged the FCC to revisit its approach after identifying four unresolved questions: whether repeated launches and deorbit burns heat the upper atmosphere, whether satellite radio transmissions interfere with astronomy, whether reflected sunlight from spacecraft disrupts ground-based imaging, and how bright trails across the night sky change the public's relationship with the sky. The FCC has not published a public response to any of those findings.
In 2024, a coalition of astronomers and space experts asked the FCC to halt future Starlink launches until the United States could study the cumulative effect, including whether retired satellites burning up on reentry damage the ozone layer. That request was not granted. The September 30 vote, if it passes, would lock in a regulatory posture that preempts those questions rather than answering them.
Carr's rationale, in his own words, is the volume and the cost of review. The commission's backlog of satellite and earth-station applications exceeds 11,000, and the agency says the existing process is slowing the build-out of space-based broadband and other services. Carr has tied the exemption to a broader "innovative space-based activities" agenda, language that frames the satellite industry as a strategic priority and environmental review as an obstacle to it.
The vote is one item on the commission's September 30 open meeting agenda. The text of the proposed rule is scheduled to be published Wednesday. If approved, the change would take effect after the standard notice-and-comment period, though the commission can waive that period in cases it deems urgent, and the text has not been released to confirm whether it would.
Two things happen regardless of how the commission votes. The first is procedural: the vote either turns a long-standing practice into a binding rule, or it does not, and the next round of challenges plays out license by license. The second is substantive, and it is the one the GAO and the astronomer coalition put on the record four and two years ago. Upper-atmosphere heating, radio interference, reflected sunlight, and reentry chemistry are not hypothetical. They are the specific open questions the FCC would now be choosing not to ask.