Elon Musk’s satellites are in the middle of a corporate dogpile at the FCC

Scale matters, SpaceX’s lawyer Pratik Shah argued to a panel of three federal appeals court judges — but only the comparatively small-scale plans for upcoming satellite launches, not the gargantuan scale of Elon Musk’s ambitions in the sky and the coming frenzy of launches from some of the most powerful companies on the ground. Shah assured the court the issue wasn’t 4,400 or so satellites originally on the license the Federal Communications Commission granted to SpaceX. Nor was it the additional 38,000 that Musk’s company plans to put into space worldwide someday as part of its Starlink network or even the 100,000, including replacements, that SpaceX might need to put on rockets over the life of the program. Although estimates vary, there are perhaps 8,000 satellites above Earth right now, many of them from Starlink, which claims it can bring internet service to all corners of the globe. The judges, who will have to weigh in on challenges to the FCC’s authorization for SpaceX to operate some future satellites at a lower altitude than first planned, had occasionally struggled with the implications of such exponential increase in what objects are zooming around miles over our heads. The lawsuit has all the trappings of ever-iterative governmental bureaucracy: an appeal by two rival businesses and a group of scientists to a court, claiming an agency ignored existing laws when it allowed a modification to an older order. Amid the flurry of filings and endless process arguments, the controversy has illuminated how billionaires and corporate giants hoping to rule the skies actually battle one another, with the government stuck in the middle.