‘It is tougher now than ever’ for the FCC ’to do anything useful,...

get anything done and that is not good for business,” he said. Regulations are easier to rewrite than laws, and the resulting inconsistencies bother him, Mattingly said: “Policy is not law. It is regulation. You can change your mind.” Space industry work lacks the cachet it once had, he said in response to a query on the satellite industry’s workforce. “I was clearly a kid of the Space Age,” Mattingly said. “That is not the way our kids are being raised. They are more focused on gadgets.” Satellites augment but don’t replace land-based networks, Mattingly said. “We are a niche player,” he added, noting that as such, satellite capacity needs to be generic so it can be able to easily adapt to changing circumstances. “It is rare that the applications that you build and launch on a satellite are the applications that you need at the end of the satellite’s life,” he said. Globalstar’s recent S-band radiation problems (CD Feb 9 p13) could doom that carrier, he implied. “The phone calls that MSV has received, and we don’t even have a handheld service, indicate Globalstar is a sitting duck to an aggressive competitor,” he said.