This article is an excerpt from Viasat 2024 Annual Report, letter to shareholders. (pg. 7-10) View the full report and forward looking statements here: Viasat 2024 Annual Report
By Mark Dankberg
The scale and scope of D2D technology is also a wake-up call to many global nations regarding the risks of domination of scarce orbits and spectrum resources by a few mega-constellations.
D2D has the potential to empower anyone, or anything, in any country in the world to be directly connected to space — emboldening certain operators to seek to bypass every form of sovereign management of telecom, computing, and cloud infrastructure. It’s a stark reminder that there are no borders in space.
Ensuring continued peaceful and reliable access to and use of space demands global cooperation and policies while respecting national sovereignty. The war in Ukraine has shown that space is both critical to national security and subject to exploitation, interference, and countermeasures. While previous generation satellite terminals and hardware are easily identified as space-enabled and managed, D2D allows satellite service to any and every mobile device to potentially be provided without regard to national regulations and management. This is causing nations to grapple with how they will now govern access to all satellite services within their borders, the extent to which foreign systems could preclude or impair their own national systems and could end up entirely at the mercy of foreign actors for critical telecom, cloud, and compute services, even inside their own borders.
Historically, the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), an arm of the United Nations, has regulated and managed access to spectrum and associated orbits — providing a venue for international agreements to ensure access to and national management of finite space resources. But the recent mad dash to capture scarce orbits and spectrum is rendering existing policies inadequate. Not all good things are made possible just by launching even more and ever larger satellites — the effect, whether intentional or not, could preclude everyone else from other nations, new and old space alike, from accessing finite orbital and spectrum resources. It is a zero- sum game.
Accordingly, access to space and orbits was likely the single most contentious issue at the quadrennial ITU World Radiocommunication Conference in Dubai in November and December 2023. While sometimes represented as “Old Space” vs. “New Space,” the differences are more aptly described as being between those willing to operate within agreed upon radio interference protection limits that facilitate equitable access to spectrum for all versus those seeking to increase their own spectrum rights at the expense of other national, regional, and/or global satellite networks. There is a growing realization that orbital and spectrum resources are indeed finite and in need of more modern policies amidst increasingly congested low earth orbits (LEO). Subsequently, a substantial majority of spacefaring nations forcefully asserted the need to thoroughly consider the impacts of mega-constellations on their own national, regional, and/or global space systems.
Not surprisingly, the issue of efficient and equitable shared access to space is at the core of “space sustainability.” Viasat has acted responsibly and taken a leading role in researching, surfacing and addressing the complex issues associated with preserving a sustainable environment in low earth orbit, containing the growth and risk of orbital debris and collisions in space, managing risks to the Earth from expired low earth orbit satellites burning up on re-entry, impacts to astronomy and the night sky, and the impacts on access to scarce RF spectrum. There is a substantial body of independent academic research and commentary on multiple aspects of the problems.
Our understanding is rooted in deep and insightful analyses of the physics of collision risk in space, radio frequency interference, and the other potential harms. While the current situation in low earth orbit is often described as “the Wild West,” we believe that one unchanging market force is that self- interest of sovereign nations will take precedence over those of a few individual foreign enterprises— likely through national and regional laws and policies to protect those sovereign national interests. We believe that the situation in space is somewhat analogous to that of the electric vehicle (EV) market. Most developed nations have explicit policies intended to promote adoption of EVs. But, when foreign EVs threaten sovereign national interests (such as jobs, technology, and national industrial ecosystem) nations enact policies intended to manage those threats. Both the U.S. and Europe have recently instituted significant tariffs for that purpose — despite the well understood benefits any EVs (including foreign-built ones) would otherwise confer. To the extent that domination of space threatens space industrial ecosystem, jobs, technology, national security, and sovereign national infrastructure, we anticipate similar national or regional policies being adopted in affected countries to contain the threat.
Clearly there are powerful market forces that must be balanced among all space systems — the benefits and convenience of low-priced, foreign-owned services from space vs. the risks associated with loss or degradation of sovereign space ecosystems and access to space for national security and with the protection of communication and compute/cloud infrastructure. There are real-world implications for global satellite connectivity service providers. Bookend approaches could be described as:
- Aggressive capture of finite orbital and spectrum resources by a few — and economic dominance of critical space supply chains and ecosystems through unprecedented scale — that is domination of space and spectrum by a few through sheer number, mass and size of satellites in orbit. Or,
- Global cooperation enabling sovereign access to, use of, and management of shared space resources for peaceful purposes. Notably this was Inmarsat’s primary founding mission for global mobility — and we see attractive business opportunities deriving from enabling international and national space ecosystems to better support this objective through technology, standards, open architectures, business model innovation, and modernization of national and international policy frameworks
Sometimes powerful market forces clash as seemingly “Irresistible Force” meets “Immovable Object.” The core issue here is simply questions of “How much is too much in space?” and “How should that amount be shared among nations?” There has been stable global accommodation on that issue for decades, and we believe straightforward policies will extend that stability to modern LEO and other non-geostationary orbit NGSO constellations as well. This scenario is playing out now, in real time, on a global basis. Multiple spacefaring nations are coming to grips with the impacts on their sovereignty, security, and industrial/technology base associated with diminishing access to scarce orbits and spectrum — and the urgent need for policies that support their national interest before their own space industrial base is irreversibly undermined.