EchoStar sells spectrum licenses to SpaceX for $17 billion while buying into Starlink
EchoStar today announced it has sold two of its spectrum licenses to SpaceX for $17 billion, in a deal that will also allow EchoStar’s customers to access Starlink.
EchoStar has entered into a definitive agreement with SpaceX to sell the company’s AWS-4 and H-block spectrum licenses for approximately $17 billion, consisting of up to $8.5 billion in cash and up to $8.5 billion in SpaceX stock valued as of the entry into the definitive agreement. Additionally, the definitive agreement provides for SpaceX to fund an aggregate of approximately $2 billion of cash interest payments payable on EchoStar debt through November of 2027.
In connection with the transaction, SpaceX and EchoStar will enter into a long-term commercial agreement, which will enable EchoStar’s Boost Mobile subscribers – through its cloud-native 5G core – to access SpaceX’s next generation Starlink Direct to Cell service.
Essentially, in exchange for the spectrum EchoStar is investing in SpaceX.
EchoStar also today canceled a contract it had signed in early August with the satellite company MDA to build its own 100 satellite constellation designed to provide direct-to-cellphone service, competing with Starlink and AST SpaceMobile. EchoStar will no longer build a rival constellation.
Wall Street apparently liked this deal, as EchoStar’s stock value quickly rose about 19%. It also appears the deal resolves questions the FCC had raised about EchoStar recent activities.
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The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
EchoStar today announced it has sold two of its spectrum licenses to SpaceX for $17 billion, in a deal that will also allow EchoStar’s customers to access Starlink.
EchoStar has entered into a definitive agreement with SpaceX to sell the company’s AWS-4 and H-block spectrum licenses for approximately $17 billion, consisting of up to $8.5 billion in cash and up to $8.5 billion in SpaceX stock valued as of the entry into the definitive agreement. Additionally, the definitive agreement provides for SpaceX to fund an aggregate of approximately $2 billion of cash interest payments payable on EchoStar debt through November of 2027.
In connection with the transaction, SpaceX and EchoStar will enter into a long-term commercial agreement, which will enable EchoStar’s Boost Mobile subscribers – through its cloud-native 5G core – to access SpaceX’s next generation Starlink Direct to Cell service.
Essentially, in exchange for the spectrum EchoStar is investing in SpaceX.
EchoStar also today canceled a contract it had signed in early August with the satellite company MDA to build its own 100 satellite constellation designed to provide direct-to-cellphone service, competing with Starlink and AST SpaceMobile. EchoStar will no longer build a rival constellation.
Wall Street apparently liked this deal, as EchoStar’s stock value quickly rose about 19%. It also appears the deal resolves questions the FCC had raised about EchoStar recent activities.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
How will use of these spectrum licenses help Starlink?
A brutal, unsparing analysis by TMF Associates on what SpaceX is up to with this move:
“But ROI has never been the primary determinant of SpaceX’s decisions, when the opportunity presents itself to dominate an industry and force competitors out. That’s why we are seeing aggressive actions from Starlink in the satellite broadband market, lowering prices for hardware and service in both the consumer and professional markets to make Amazon Kuiper’s entry harder (including a new unlimited maritime plan for merchant vessels at only $2500 per month, which will also undermine Viasat’s NexusWave).
“And in this case, by spending $17B, SpaceX has not only persuaded EchoStar to give up its D2D plans but has now made it much harder for any competitor to move forward when they can’t possibly compete with SpaceX’s speed in bringing new satellites to market.”
https://tmfassociates.com/blog/2025/09/08/spacex-disrupts-everyones-plans-again/
I don’t think this will kill Kuiper, which has the resources to overcome any number of obstacles and eat vast amounts of losses. But I think they’re right to some degree that this will make Kuiper’s job harder.
Of course, it takes two to tango. I guess dancing is brutal. (It certainly is for me!)
Amazing that we are talking about 50MHz of bandwidth here, With the precision of phased array antennas and code domain multiplexing and probably things even more subtle than that. BTW, if a satellite can handle part of your cell phone data/call at your request then it can probably see a heck of a lot all of the time when it wants to see it.
Boeing considering only ROI is how they got in trouble. I would feel better if that $17 bil was spent on Starship. Echostar being flush with money could be a threat down the road if that money buys influence.
Swapping money for bandwidth is like a kid selling you his invisible friend—what are you buying?
Rockribbed1,
Buying this spectrum will keep it from going to any actual competitor like Kuiper or AST SpaceMobile. EchoStar has just, in effect, become, substantially, a captive Starlink reseller.
Richard M,
Starlink’s consequential competitors are Kuiper and AST SpaceMobile. This deal will make things harder for both of them. Not shoot-them-in-the-head harder, to be sure. More like whack-them-in-the-shins harder.
And it provides a graceful and gradual exit from the ranks of satellite owners for EchoStar if it wants to take it. EchoStar owns 13 active GEO comsats, six of which are now over 15 years old. Six others are between 8 and 13 years old. The only new GEO comsat in the fleet is EchoStar XXIV(Jupiter 3) which is a heavy, high-performance bird launched on a Falcon Heavy two years ago. It was Echostar’s first fleet upgrade in six years.
Patrick Underwood,
Dance is more like impossible for me. The wife and I signed up for some latin dance lessons quite a number of years ago figuring it would be fun exercise. She did okay, but after about a half-hour, the instructor pulled me aside and said, “I’ve been teaching dance for 28 years. In all of that time, I’ve encountered exactly two people I could not teach. You are number three.” So it goes.
George C,
Actually, it seems to be 100Mhz of total bandwidth – 50Mhz each in the AWS-4 and H-block bands.
As for what LEO comsats can hear, nothing the DoD’s – oops, I mean the DoW’s – big GEO elint birds haven’t been picking up for decades. We’ve been living in a post-privacy world in many respects for a couple of generations now.
Jeff Wright,
The cash part of the deal is only about $10.5 billion. The rest is stock – about 2% of SpaceX at recent valuation. That makes EchoStar a SpaceX investor as well as, in effect, a Starlink reseller. It gives EchoStar a nice incentive to push the product hard. Far from making EchoStar a threat, this deal removes EchoStar as a potential threat and converts it to an ally.
But I’m curious – what mysterious “influence” do you fear EchoStar buying? You sound like one of those people who always imagine someone is following them.
Bandwidth is invisible alright, but it’s not comparable to an “invisible friend. It’s a license to exclusively use a defined a part of the EM spectrum for particular purposes. If you don’t understand what makes that valuable, I despair of how to educate you.
You remind me a bit of an old blue-collar socialist I used to know who stubbornly refused to believe that any kind of financial services company – except banks – was a real business. Insurance? Stock brokerage? Swamp gas, according to him. If he couldn’t hold it in his hand, it wasn’t real.
That’s not a bad position to have–having something tangible.
My point is that Echostar might benefit from anti-Elon sentiment down the road. Frequency permission depends on what robe you encounter in court…that isn’t physical either but could make all the money you spent in your business worthless.
What I worry about is Echostar becoming Starlink’s McDonnell Douglas. Who is eating whom?
Starlink is how Elon will help space exploration.
Echostar ‘s suits likely don’t have such a noble perspective. That is what I find worrisome.
If mega-constellations are outlawed–or worse-limited, Echostar will survive due to other assets where Starlink would be cratered.
Echostar could then perhaps buy its remaining assets for a song, say it will de-orbit data to stay in compliance–then buy a robe in their favor.
Nice to have a mega-constellations you neither built nor launched.
I trust nothing.
Yes, that thought had occurred to me, too. I guess we’ll see!
Dick Eagleson wrote: “EchoStar owns 13 active GEO comsats, six of which are now over 15 years old. Six others are between 8 and 13 years old. The only new GEO comsat in the fleet is EchoStar XXIV(Jupiter 3) which is a heavy, high-performance bird launched on a Falcon Heavy two years ago. It was Echostar’s first fleet upgrade in six years.”
The significance of the age of the geostationary Earth orbit (GEO) satellites is that they are generally designed for a 15 year lifetime. The stationkeeping propellant tanks run low about that time, and the solar arrays have degraded from ultraviolet light from the Sun to the point that fewer and fewer relay amplifiers can be powered.
The GEO operators became worried, a few years back, that the low Earth orbit constellations were going to perform so well that their own satellites would become obsolete. This led them to reduce the number of GEO satellites that they ordered from the manufacturers of such large satellites.
Small satellites and large constellations are making a huge change in the communication satellite industry.
“If you don’t understand what makes that valuable, I despair of how to educate you.”
I’m willing to give it a try:
Jeff Wright asked: “Swapping money for bandwidth is like a kid selling you his invisible friend—what are you buying?”
Like an earthly radio station, the radio signals to and from these satellites are the product. They are the revenue source. That makes them valuable.
In addition, the U.S. government has stolen the radio spectrum from the public and now charges money for companies, such as those earthly radio stations, to use radio frequencies for profitable purposes. A century ago, radio waves belonged to We the People, and the FCC’s job was to merely assure that those who used the aether did not interfere with each other. However, earlier this century the U.S. government realized that the radio spectrum is valuable to commercial companies and decided to turn the spectrum into a profit center for itself, not just for those companies.
I’m not sure what the government charges a radio station to use its licensed part of the spectrum, but about a decade and a half ago many radio stations had to change their location on the radio dial, because someone else outbid them for their own part of the spectrum. The government knows that these frequencies are valuable, and they are willing to turn our right to use them into some form of privilege, as long as we are willing to pay extortion money for their use.
So much for the government protecting our rights.
On the other hand, it is proper to wonder whether $17 billion is too much to pay for these two portions of the radio spectrum, and it is proper to believe that the cash outlay would be better spent on Starship. The mission is Mars. Starlink is merely a means to fund the mission. When it comes to figuring out how much it cost SpaceX to colonize Mars, do we add in this $17 billion, and do we put it toward the development of Starship? In April of 2023, SpaceX said that they had spent about $3 billion on Starship with an expectation of spending $2 billion per year. That puts their expenditure at $8 billion spent so far on Starship development, including ground support and infrastructure.
I just want HAMs and CBs protected
Whether it is Uncle Sam or Elon trying to snatch those bands matters to me not a not.
Jeff Wright,
Like I said, you have the paranoid mentality. That along with no apparent knowledge of how government works, is a recipe for foolishness.
Echostar now owns 2% of SpaceX. How, exactly, would it “benefit” from “anti-Elon sentiment? And whose anti-Elon sentiment? People hateposting on BlueSky don’t matter. Leftists in office? There are going to be notably fewer of those as time goes by. Ditto for leftists on the bench. “Robes,” in any event, don’t control spectrum allocations.
McDonnell-Douglas anent Boeing isn’t relevant. SpaceX bought spectrum, not EchoStar itself. EchoStar is a minority shareholder. It has no former executives taking over SpaceX and won’t even rate seat on the board.
How would megaconstellations be outlawed? Democrats didn’t try to do that even when they were last in charge. Given current trends, I don’t anticipate any Dem return to significant power ever.
There is no trans-national mechanism to outlaw megaconstellations either. You’re flinching at shadows.
Edward,
Starlink is the means to fund both Starship and Mars. That makes Starlink the opposite of “mere.” The spectrum acquired from EchoStar will allow Starlink to directly compete with legacy terrestrial cell providers for retail phone accounts in a few years as well as with all legacy broadband providers. That vastly expands the potential revenue Starlink can make going forward.
Dick Eagleson, the intensity of an electromagnetic signal goes down by the square of the distance, and the angular focus accuracy of any directional antenna (physical and/or phased array) also goes down with distance, as does the ability to exclude noise. In addition every additional satellite provides more ability to focus on a particular point on the surface of the earth (well, and ability look out toward other satellites too), capturing more signal from more directions.
So having an array of hundreds of satellites at 350 kilometers instead of a few at 35000 kilometers (factor of 100 distance, so less signal at GEO by a factor of 1.0E4 or 0.01% less.) sure does make a radical change in capability. Of course there could have been hundreds and/or thousands of classified GEO and LEO satellites decades ago. And yes, privacy issues even with a handful of these in the air. Not saying, couldn’t be saying if I knew anything concrete which I don’t.
Now also think about the millions of phased array ground stations, now sold retail at Best Buy, all with the ability to gather and process signals, including with associated WIFI. The ability to detect black objects by occlusion is also immense in this case. Could there still be stealth? [Unless paper and wood aircraft with ceramic engines?]
Obviously if I had actually worked in this area I couldn’t be talking about this. I’m just a radio guy from a young age, university math/physics plus on the job software engineering and signal processing.
But SpaceX has really changed things, just look at the number of launches, and the number of phased array devices in play. As an exercise for the reader, estimate the intensity of a single microwave pulse that hundreds of satellites within line of sight from any particular point on the surface of the earth (or LEO) could be subjected to. You have to estimate battery/capacitor power available at each device, type and size of power transistors, efficiency, etc. Would this be Starlink or DealthStar Link at some time in the near future, or currently?
Dick Eagleson
You wrote: “Starlink is the means to fund both Starship and Mars.”
That’s what I said. Mars is the goal, the mission. Starlink is merely one means of funding the goal, the mission. Starlink is not the mission, and today it is a huge cost to the mission. Will this cost pay off, when, and how far has this purchase set back the mission?