By Gianluca Lo Nostro<\/p>\n
April 27 (Reuters) – Demand for alternative satellite services from U.S. businesses and the Pentagon is resilient despite SpaceX’s request to U.S. \u200cregulators to restrict access for European rivals, the CEO of European satellite \u200coperator Eutelsat said.<\/p>\n
In a letter to the Federal Communications Commission on April 16, Elon Musk’s SpaceX urged \u200bthe FCC to limit market access to foreign satellite operators whose governments block or disadvantage U.S. operators.<\/p>\n
SpaceX pointed to Luxembourg-based SES as an example of a European operator that has benefited from U.S. market access – though it stopped short of naming other European \u200coperators such as Eutelsat. It \u2060also urged the U.S. telecoms watchdog to retaliate in kind to moves like the EU Space Act and Digital Networks Act, proposals \u2060that SpaceX says would create barriers to U.S. firms in European markets.<\/p>\n
“Obviously, we are conscious of the new geopolitical environment… it’s not a surprise that American companies are lobbying \u200bfor less \u200bregulation,” Eutelsat CEO Jean-Francois Fallacher told Reuters in \u200ban interview.<\/p>\n
“European space law is going \u200cin the right direction. We want to protect space, we want to actually look carefully at the way space is safe. We all know that there will be the need for more coordination in space,” he added.<\/p>\n
Eutelsat, backed by the French and British governments, is the main European rival to Musk’s Starlink. The company flagged a \u200cslowdown in some Pentagon contract renewals last \u200byear amid broader government spending cuts from President Donald \u200bTrump’s administration.<\/p>\n
But Fallacher said U.S. \u200bdemand has not waned. Eutelsat, which serves commercial, government and military \u200cclients, supplies satellite services to the U.S. \u200bDepartment of Defense \u200bthrough a proxy company.<\/p>\n
“We have appetite in the U.S,” he said. “Both businesses and the Department of Defense have appetite for alternative solutions – for reliability and redundancy \u200bpurposes.”<\/p>\n
The company is also \u200cin talks with governments and other customers – including in the U.S. – about \u200bhosting Earth observation and communication payloads on its satellites.<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Gianluca Lo \u200bNostro in Gdansk; Editing by Emelia Sithole-Matarise)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Gianluca Lo Nostro April 27 (Reuters) – Demand for alternative satellite services from U.S. businesses and the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":608942,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[264653,264652,24340,13798,113532,98067,79,193,1513,188149],"class_list":{"0":"post-608941","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-european-operator","9":"tag-european-rivals","10":"tag-eutelsat","11":"tag-federal-communications-commission","12":"tag-satellite-operators","13":"tag-satellite-services","14":"tag-science","15":"tag-space","16":"tag-spacex","17":"tag-the-pentagon"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/608941","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=608941"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/608941\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/608942"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=608941"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=608941"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=608941"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}