[Starlink] Re: Starlink and Iran

[Ulrich Speidel <u.speidel@auckland.ac.nz>]

On 17/01/2026 1:07 pm, David Lang wrote:
>
>> The licensing authorities in the respective countries (i.e., the FCC 
>> in the US - and they're held to account by their competitors, of 
>> which SpaceX has a few in the US). At an international level, if one 
>> country were to ignore this, so would everyone else, which would make 
>> space-to-ground comms in these bands pretty unworkable pretty quickly 
>> as there'd be a lot of "my output power is bigger than yours" 
>> happening. One of the main reasons for having this limit is to ensure 
>> GEO sats can get their signals through. Whether the current level 
>> that the limit is set at and the way it's computed is appropriate is 
>> another question, and SpaceX have certainly tried to litigate that 
>> before the FCC.
>
> have you looked at what the latest changes allow?
No - if anyone has a pointer to what the official source for the latest 
SpaceX-FCC licensing interactions is ... I'd been hoping to figure that 
out but haven't yet.
>
>>> 2. Could the physically satellites go higher over some territory? 
>>> How much higher?
>
>>>     I assume it's software controlled.
>
>> A satellite has three types of energy that determine its orbital 
>> motion: Potential energy from orbital height, kinetic energy from 
>> moving, and energy stored in its thruster fuel.
>
> I think he's talking about the radio energy at the receiver, not 
> satellite energy.
Will respond to Michael's response on this shortly.

-- 
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Dr. Ulrich Speidel

School of Computer Science

Room 303S.594 (City Campus)

The University of Auckland
u.speidel@auckland.ac.nz
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~ulrich/
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