Author: Owen D. Kurtin

As the 112th U.S. Congress convenes this month, the shock wave created by the November mid-term elections, which produced the largest turnover of seats in the House of Representatives in...

It was not so long ago that the mobile satellite service (MSS) sector looked dead in the water. With the exception of longest-standing incumbent Inmarsat, which boasted a successful IPO...

Canada’s Parliament enacted legislation July 12 to remove restrictions on foreign ownership of Canadian-licensed satellite carriers. Prior to the legislation, Canada limited foreign ownership of telecommunications carriers, including satellite carriers,...

For years now, legal, finance and government intelligentsia have propounded a purely competition-based theory of regulation, in which, as long as markets were competitive and transparent, industry-specific types of regulation...

Eutelsat and ictQatar announced in May a strategic alliance for the joint procurement of a communications satellite to be positioned in Eutelsat’s 25.5 East orbital slot. ictQatar is the Qatari...

President Obama was expected to sign into law in July the Dodd-Frank Act, the most extensive reform of financial services regulation since the Great Depression. The reforms look to be...

In what has been described as an unprecedented event, the Orbital Sciences-built, Intelsat-owned-and-operated Galaxy 15 satellite stopped communicating with ground controllers April 5. But the satellite’s C-band payload remained operational...

In February, we discussed satellite broadband and the pending release of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC)’s National Broadband Plan . Released in March (available at www.broadband.gov), the plan was...

At SATELLITE 2010, I was privileged to moderate the launch service providers’ panel, bringing together the chief executives of Arianespace, International Launch Services (ILS), Sea Launch and China Great Wall...

In December, we discussed the final report of the White House Review of U.S. Human Spaceflight Plans Committee, otherwise known as the Augustine Committee. The report found NASA’s current human...