By Gianluca Lo Nostro
April 27 (Reuters) - Demand for alternative satellite services from U.S. businesses and the Pentagon is resilient despite SpaceX's request to U.S. regulators to restrict access for European rivals, the CEO of European satellite operator Eutelsat said.
In a letter to the Federal Communications Commission on April 16, Elon Musk's SpaceX urged the FCC to limit market access to foreign satellite operators whose governments block or disadvantage U.S. operators.
SpaceX pointed to Luxembourg-based
SES as an example of a European operator that has benefited from U.S. market access - though it stopped short of naming other European operators such as Eutelsat. It also urged the U.S. telecoms watchdog to retaliate in kind to moves like the EU Space Act and Digital Networks Act, proposals that SpaceX says would create barriers to U.S. firms in European markets.
"Obviously, we are conscious of the new geopolitical environment... it's not a surprise that American companies are lobbying for less regulation," Eutelsat CEO Jean-Francois Fallacher told Reuters in an interview.
"European space law is going in the right direction. We want to protect space, we want to actually look carefully at the way space is safe. We all know that there will be the need for more coordination in space," he added.
Eutelsat, backed by the French and British governments, is the main European rival to Musk's Starlink. The company flagged a slowdown in some Pentagon contract renewals last year amid broader government spending cuts from President Donald Trump's administration.
But Fallacher said U.S. demand has not waned. Eutelsat, which serves commercial, government and military clients, supplies satellite services to the U.S. Department of Defense through a proxy company.
"We have appetite in the U.S," he said. "Both businesses and the Department of Defense have appetite for alternative solutions - for reliability and redundancy purposes."
The company is also in talks with governments and other customers - including in the U.S. - about hosting Earth observation and communication payloads on its satellites.
(Reporting by Gianluca Lo Nostro in Gdansk; Editing by Emelia Sithole-Matarise)
