Hello and welcome to the tech policy podcast. I'm your sometime host, Baron Soka. Ash is in Russia still. We don't know if she's ever coming back. But we hope so. We miss her. And with me in the studio today is Jim Dunstan. Jim is our favorite space lawyer, an adjunct fellow at Tech Freedom and my long-time mentor. Jim has been on the show several times. He did a three-part intro to space law last year, which we will link to in the show notes. Jim, thanks for coming. It's great to be back doing this. And so you're really a space lawyer? I'm really a space lawyer. You get that a lot at

parties, right? Yes. Yes. I'm a walking talking space lawyer. Yes. So when people ask you about

space law, what, where do you usually go with that? Well, after about four words, their eyes usually

roll back in their heads and I just stop at that point. Are those four, let me guess. It's the outer space treaty of. You don't even get to 1967.

They just tune out it of.

Well, we're not going to talk about the outer space treaty today, I think.

I doubt it.

Okay, good.

So this is not a space law 101.

This is a space law applied as applied class.

And we're going to be talking today about the latest exciting development in satellites,

something that's never happened before.

So satellite business has been around for a long time.

We've had satellites in orbit since, well, since Sputnik and communication satellites

for a long time commercial satellite business.

They go through a licensing process at the FCC, the International Telecommunications Union coordinates that use of spectrum across countries.

And that generally goes pretty smoothly.

Maybe a little few hiccups here and there, but we all know how that works.

Until what?

What just happened?

So what happened over the last couple of weeks?

It is that magazine IEEE Spectrum released an article in which it pointed out that the FCC for the first time, as far as they know,

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