Plus: The Lightspeed gamble and Canadian sovereignty
By Dan Robitzski
Welcome back to our weekly newsletter highlighting the opinions and perspectives of the SpaceNews community.
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SpaceX is positioning itself to serve as the toll collector to space as it expands to more lucrative markets higher in the stack. That gives the company unusual leverage in determining which aspects of the space economy, from launch to orbital compute, remain open and contestable to other companies, according to a commentary article by Konstantinos Trantopoulos, a senior advisor and fellow at IMD Business School.
"At the base, launch access is tightening: outside customers face multi-year waits. Higher up, connectivity stays available, but on SpaceX’s terms. The question is why that grip should hold, when dominant infrastructure elsewhere can eventually be contested," Trantopoulos wrote.
The main strategic question for space companies, he wrote, "is whether the layer you depend on is one its owner can close around you. In space, that structure is taking shape faster than many firms are adapting to it."
Read the full SpaceNews commentary here. |
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The Gulf of Oman, imaged in September 2018 by the Copernicus Sentinel-3A satellite. Credit: ESA; CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
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Canada is making a big play in building out its own sovereign space systems, with a significant financial investment in the planned Telesat Canada communications constellation. It's an ambitious bid but it's also a gamble that, without proper support, risks leaving Canada dependent on American systems in the future, according to an article by Wesley Wark, a senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation.
"The Canadian government has committed to a massive gamble that the Lightspeed satellites will get into orbit (on U.S. rockets), on time and can make good on their promised capabilities. If the gamble pays off, it will bring real benefits for sovereign Arctic communications and the potential for new and advantageous allied partnerships. Hopefully, the gamble is too big to fail," Wark wrote.
Read the full commentary on SpaceNews here.
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