Space Policy: Fewer Public Tools

Washington wants to make it easier for satellite internet companies to push more signal through the sky at the same moment it is pulling money out of the main civilian office that is supposed to help keep those satellites from getting in each other’s way. The White House’s fiscal year 2027 budget documents were released in April 2026, and SpaceNews reported the Office of Space Commerce would fall to about $11 million from roughly $65 million in 2024. (whitehouse.gov, spacenews.com) That office sits inside the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and its biggest active project is the Traffic Coordination System for Space. The system is meant to give civilian and commercial satellite operators basic collision-warning data, the orbital version of air traffic alerts. (noaa.gov, space.commerce.gov) The Traffic Coordination System for Space already has a first version in service. The Office of Space Commerce says the initial release went out in September 2024 and sends conjunction data messages, which are warnings that two objects may pass dangerously close, to a beta group of users. (space.commerce.gov) The budget squeeze lands in the middle of a satellite boom. Thousands of low-Earth-orbit spacecraft are already up, and companies want many more because lower orbits can deliver faster broadband with less delay than older high-orbit systems. (space.commerce.gov, docs.fcc.gov) At the same time, the Federal Communications Commission voted on April 9, 2026 to rewrite old sharing rules for satellite broadband. Its fact sheet says the agency is moving away from power limits designed in the late 1990s and toward a performance-based system for protecting older geostationary satellites. (docs.fcc.gov) In plain terms, the Federal Communications Commission is saying newer constellations should be allowed to transmit more aggressively if they can prove they do not degrade the other operator’s service past a set threshold. The new backstops in the order include a 3% time-weighted average throughput degradation limit and a 0.1% increase in link unavailability for protected geostationary links. (docs.fcc.gov) That could mean cheaper or faster service in places where fiber lines never arrived. The Federal Communications Commission’s own fact sheet says the old limits can reduce coverage and capacity for non-geostationary broadband systems, especially for rural and remote users. (docs.fcc.gov) But power rules and traffic rules solve different problems. One governs radio interference between networks, while the other helps operators avoid physical close calls in orbit, and cutting one side while loosening the other means more commercial freedom with less public coordination. (docs.fcc.gov, space.commerce.gov, spacenews.com) You can see the demand pressure on the ground already. A Change.org petition from general aviation users asks Starlink to restore roaming plans for pilots, arguing that in-flight access to weather and airport safety information had become part of their routine flying setup. (change.org) So the picture in April 2026 is not “less space activity.” It is more satellites, more bandwidth ambitions, and more customers trying to use those networks for homes, vehicles, boats, and aircraft, while the civilian office building the government’s shared traffic-warning system faces a proposed 83% funding cut. (docs.fcc.gov, space.commerce.gov, spacenews.com) If Congress accepts anything close to that budget, the United States would be betting that private coordination can scale faster than public infrastructure. The gamble is that spectrum deals and collision warnings can both be handled well enough by industry even as orbital traffic keeps rising. (whitehouse.gov, spacenews.com, space.commerce.gov)