Talk Around Town: The FCC Might Finally Stop Treating Rockets Like Second-Class Radio Citizens

What the Chatter Is All About

Well, butter my biscuit and call it progress — the federal government has apparently noticed that trying to launch a whole mess of rockets while treatin' their radio gear like a guest who can't eat till everybody else is done might not scale real well. The FCC put out a Public Notice on August 25, 2026, according to Global Policy Watch, Steptoe, and Akin Gump — all drawing from the FCC's own document — asking the public how the agency ought to fix spectrum access for commercial space launch and reentry activities. That notice came hot on the heels of a Trump Administration presidential memorandum on National Space Transportation Policy, dated August 20, 2026, which, according to Steptoe, directed the FCC to lock in reliable spectrum access for both commercial and federal launch, reentry, recovery, and on-orbit operations, and to report back on its game plan within 180 days and every two years after that.

The presidential memorandum, as analyzed by Steptoe, also planted a flag in the ground: it set an aspirational target of U.S. space transportation ranges handling north of 1,000 launches and reentries per year by 2030. To put that in hog-to-market terms, the country currently manages somewhere around 200 launch activities annually, according to Steptoe's read of that memorandum. That is a five-fold increase in the ambitious column — and right now, the radio infrastructure underpinning all those launches still operates under rules that were not exactly designed with that kind of volume in mind.

What Is Actually Confirmed and Documented

Here is the part where we swap the rumor mill for the deed box. Both Global Policy Watch and Steptoe independently confirm, drawing from the FCC's own August 25, 2026 Public Notice, that commercial space launch and reentry operations presently hold only secondary spectrum status. In plain English — or in redneck: rockets are the youngest kid at the table, and they don't eat till the grownups are finished. They must accept interference from incumbent users and cannot fire back with any of their own. Those incumbent users include federal agencies and existing non-federal services that have been parked on those frequencies longer than most of today's rocket companies have existed.

The FCC's notice, as summarized by Global Policy Watch, specifically asks whether launches should receive new primary or co-primary allocations, and whether the existing launch frequency bands — 2025–2110 MHz, 2200–2290 MHz, and 2360–2395 MHz — ought to be expanded with additional frequencies. Separately, the FCC in March 2026 unanimously adopted what Davis Wright Tremaine and Morgan Lewis both describe as an NPRM targeting spectrum for so-called emergent space operations — lunar missions, on-orbit servicing, and orbital laboratories — acknowledging what those analyses describe as an acute shortage of usable spectrum for those kinds of missions. That rulemaking is distinct from, but runs alongside, the launch-focused Public Notice.

On the infrastructure side, the NTIA launched a Space Launch Frequency Coordination Portal on March 24, 2026, according to the Federal Register, replacing what had been a manual, email-based spectrum request process with a centralized web application for commercial launch providers — a step directed by the Launch Communications Act of 2024. It is a step forward, like replacing a party-line phone with a fax machine, but the underlying spectrum scarcity it is meant to manage remains very much unresolved.

What Nobody Has Figured Out Yet

Lord have mercy, the list of unknowns here is longer than a dirt road in August. The FCC has not indicated whether it favors elevating launches to primary status, co-primary status, or some other arrangement entirely. Incumbent users — think military test ranges, aeronautical operations, and a whole barnyard of federal agencies — have deeply rooted equities in those bands, and none of them are lining up to voluntarily share the pasture. The public comment window that the August 25 notice opened closed on September 14, 2026, according to the FCC's own document, so the agency is now sitting on a pile of filings and has not telegraphed where it is headed.

The Commercial Space Federation filed a petition with the FCC on August 4, 2026, according to Steptoe and Akin Gump, asking the agency to throw out the legacy Part 87 frequency-coordinator system — currently administered by a body called AFTRCC — and replace it with a database-assisted light-licensing arrangement covering the 1435–1535 MHz, 2360–2395 MHz, and 5091–5150 MHz bands. Akin Gump notes that two of those proposed bands fall entirely outside the existing launch-service allocations, which would broaden the whole conversation considerably. Whether the FCC will go anywhere near that proposal is, at this point, anybody's guess — it is a contested industry position, not a regulatory direction.

There is also the coordination gap that the Foundation for Defense of Democracies flagged in May 2026: despite a 2022 Memorandum of Understanding between the FCC and NTIA, there is still no centralized, formalized framework that pulls together the FCC, the NTIA, NASA, the Pentagon, and private operators into one coherent spectrum-coordination process. That is a bit like having a barn-raising where nobody agrees whose land it is on.

Congress Already Threw a Wrench in the Gearbox

Before anybody gets too dreamy-eyed about the FCC swoopin' in on a white horse, it is worth noting that the agency's broader space modernization ambitions have already drawn a bipartisan slapdown from Capitol Hill. In February 2026, the bipartisan leadership of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee issued a press release urging the FCC to withdraw or substantially narrow its separate 'Space Modernization for the 21st Century' NPRM, arguing that several provisions in that proposal — specifically those tying spectrum licenses to collision-risk mitigation and safety certification requirements — go well beyond what Congress authorized the FCC to do in the communications space. The committee's position, as stated in that press release, is that space-safety regulation is not the FCC's lane.

That jurisdictional dust-up is still unresolved. The FCC has not backed down from those provisions publicly, and Congress has not passed legislation clarifying the boundary. This matters for the launch-spectrum proceeding because any attempt by the FCC to attach non-communications conditions to new launch allocations could run into the same constitutional and statutory objections. In regulatory terms, it is like trying to attach a fence-painting requirement to a fishing license — might make sense to somebody, but the legal foundation is genuinely disputed.

Editorial Analysis: The Gap Between Ambition and Altitude

This is analysis, not reporting. The gap between a presidential memorandum calling for 1,000 annual launches and the current regulatory apparatus is, in this publication's read, substantial enough to be genuinely funny if it weren't so consequential. The FCC is running a notice-and-comment process — the regulatory equivalent of posting a flyer at the feed store — while the White House is talking about quintupling launch cadence in four years. Those two timelines do not obviously rhyme.

The spectrum problem, as documented across multiple independent legal and policy analyses, is structural, not cosmetic. Rockets occupy frequency bands on a guest-pass basis, and the incumbents who hold the permanent seats include some of the most politically durable institutions in Washington — the Defense Department chief among them. Any reallocation fight that asks the Pentagon to share or yield spectrum is, in this publication's estimation, a negotiation measured in years, not months. The 180-day reporting window in the presidential memorandum may produce a report; it is far less likely to produce resolved allocations.

The Commercial Space Federation's light-licensing proposal is interesting precisely because it tries to sidestep the primary-versus-secondary allocation fight by building a coordination database instead of litigating band ownership. Whether that is pragmatic compromise or a fancy way of avoiding the actual problem is, frankly, the kind of question the FCC's comment record will need to answer. What is not analysis but fact: none of this is settled, no rule has issued, and the comment window just closed.