But that is the future. Today, even SpaceX does not have the launch capacity for a million satellite constellation, so I do not understand why they would have filed an application for something that they cannot hope to accomplish anytime soon. Unless the application is for a system many years in the future, then they are almost certainly premature on their application.

Perhaps Amazon should have let SpaceX go ahead and fall flat on its face, as Amazon is doing now.

If it had been me, I would have built something like this:
http://www.astronautix.com/g/globis.html

Larger sats, higher up….less launches.

The latency wouldn’t be as good, but the larger the space asset is, the smaller a consumer handset is needed.

Bezos would have worked with Apple, and offered free service just long enough to bleed Starlink.

But Bezos likes attorneys better than rockets, it seems.

With all due respect to Eager Space, there were a lot of people saying similar things about Starlink a decade ago. I think Mr. Van Dune is closer to being correct on that point than Eager Space.

What makes me uneasy is that there are still arrogant and clueless twits in major American companies who think they have some sort of natural right to jam up their competitors by begging special favors from government. Chairman Carr has administered a much-needed roundhouse bitch slap to one of the most egregious such entities in full view of the public so as to not only let this particular malefactor know where it stands, but also, as the saying goes, “to encourage the others.” He correctly notes that begging such unwarranted favors from an agency whose rules the supplicant is already in serious breach of – and which is the subject of yet another special pleading – is not a good look. One can only hope the sound of that slap will echo for years in the C-suites of major US corporations.

Absent this completely egregious recent attempt by Amazon to get the FCC to do dirty work on its behalf, I suspect its request for relief from deployment deadlines for Amazon Leo would have been straightforwardly approved. Now, I think, there is a serious question as to just what the FCC will choose to do. The worst the FCC could do, under its own rules, is to cap Amazon Leo at twice whatever the number of birds is that Amazon manages to get on-orbit by the July deadline. If the FCC did that, it would pretty much doom the whole Amazon Leo enterprise. So the FCC will probably not do that. But it might well impose a significant haircut on the total number of Amazon Leo sats it will approve. I think the FCC pretty much has to impose at least a bit of hurt on Amazon to make the point that “if it hurts when you do that, don’t do that.”

2. I likewise don’t disagree with Brendan Carr’s take, but I am uneasy with the FCC chair taking such a vicious public shot at a regulated operator like this (even one I don’t much like). Commissioners are allowed to express opinions, but I’d rather see it communicated privately to Amazon. But what do I know? Loads of people on X are loving it. And I guess it’s on brand for this administration.

3. I also don’t disagree that even so, Carr is going to be very reluctant to cancel Amazon’s license outright; there’s still an abundant public interest in having competition in this market. But there are ways to slap Amazon’s wrists well short of that and yet still allow them a way to continue deploying their constellation in some form, as Bob says.

It’s why I don’t donate to no-kill shelters.

Musk: “Hold my beer!”

In fairness to Amazon, though, its assertion that it would take “centuries” to put a million satellites into orbit is just based on the millennium or two it would certainly take Amazon to do such a deed based on its tortoise-y progress with its Leo network.