The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has proposed a set of reforms and new rules to cut bureaucracy around satellite ground stations to empower what they define as the ground-station-as-a-service, or GSaaS market, to derive an advantage to the US space economy.

The amendments mean operators of ground stations can seek licenses without declaring specific satellites as their communication point, instead seeking a “baseline licence,” which instead require simple notifications to the commission for each new point of satellite communication added or removed thereafter. The FCC believes this change will nearly halve its book of Earth station modification applications.

As the total number of satellites has multiplied, many of these procedural sea changes have filtered into the ecosystem as a necessity of dealing with thousands of different satellites.

“Through these and other streamlining improvements, the FCC will hold itself accountable to more predictable timelines, such as a 30-day shot clock for earth station renewal applications,” FCC chairman Brendan Carr said in a statement.

“This neutral-host infrastructure model has already proven to be successful in the wireless industry. By sparing companies the time and money to build their own bespoke infrastructure, we believe Ground-Station-as-a-Service can provide a similar boost for space startups.”

The reforms also:

• Eliminate the need for the retention of physical copies of filings, which the commission estimates to be added to at a rate of 21,000 pages per year.
• Ground station operators will also now be able to file for license renewals up to a year before expiration, expanding the existing window.
• Non-US licensed satellite operators dealing in the US can now obtain special temporary authority using procedures previously only available to US licensees, making working with American ground stations easier for other countries.

Carr suggests the reforms can also assist prospective satellite operators, who should anticipate a more resilient ground station business segment for hire, supposedly reducing the necessity for them to build their own infrastructure.

The move is part of a rush of deregulation in the US space economy, most bombastically championed by the President in a recent Executive Order scrapping many environmental regulations around space launches. The FCC’s reform isn’t nearly as dramatic a change as those introduced by the EO, however.