San Francisco: Tech billionaire Elon Musk’s companies do not care about rules, Amazon said this week before the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in the dispute over the two companies’ plans to build rival satellite networks, media reports said.
Amazon slammed Musk’s SpaceX as a serial rule-breaker and sent FCC officials a list of Musk’s past troubles with other regulators, mounting its most aggressive attempt yet to push back on SpaceX’s speedy timeline for deploying its broadband satellites, the Verge reported.
“Try to hold a Musk-led company to flight rules? You’re ‘fundamentally broken,'” Amazon wrote in its filing, referring to the time Musk complained that the Federal Aviation Administration’s regulatory structure slowed down SpaceX’s operations.
“Try to hold a Musk-led company to health and safety rules? You’re ‘unelected & ignorant’,” it added, referring to Musk’s beef with officials who sought to keep factories closed to curb the spread of the coronavirus.
This particular fight goes back to earlier this year when SpaceX proposed an update to its Starlink network, a vast constellation of satellites in low-Earth orbit designed to beam broadband internet to rural areas with little to no internet connections.
SpaceX has over 1,700 satellites in orbit so far, with about 100,000 customers using its internet services in a beta phase. Amazon is planning a similar satellite network called Kuiper with more than 3,000 satellites, but it hasn’t revealed production plans or launched any satellites to space yet, the report said.
Last month, SpaceX filed a request to tweak its proposal to the FCC, asking the commission to approve two plans for deploying Starlink satellites in the future. SpaceX, its filing said, would only implement one of the two plans, mainly hinging its decision on how quickly its next generation of Starlink satellites will be ready for launch and when its Starship rocket would be ready to start launching those Starlink satellites, the report added.