[Starlink] Re: Starlink and Iran

Ulrich Speidel
2026-01-17T21:56:32Z

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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