Five forcing functions, all dated within the last eighteen months.

On April 30, 2026 — five days before this page was first published — the Federal Communications Commission voted to modernise the EPFD (Equivalent Power Flux Density) framework that has governed NGSO/GSO interference for three decades. The replacement regime is explicit: NGSO and GSO operators can bargain for interference protections through voluntary, private agreement. The Order applies to current NGSO licensees, market-access grantees, pending applicants, and every future applicant.

That is the regulatory door. The FCC has just told the orbital spectrum industry that private coordination is the path forward — and a private coordination market without post-trade infrastructure is bilateral, opaque, and operationally expensive. The infrastructure to make it cleared, neutral, and auditable is what Wavestar is.

The FCC's own estimate for the value unlocked by the modernisation is in excess of $2 billion in economic benefit and a sevenfold increase in space-based broadband capacity. That number assumes someone builds the coordination layer underneath. We are that layer.

Microsoft retired Azure Orbital in 2024. EQT acquired Eutelsat's ground-station assets the same year. AWS, KSAT, Leaf Space, Atlas Space, RBC Signals, and Infostellar are vertically integrating — each pulling operators into a proprietary stack that does not interoperate cleanly with the others.

The Ground Station as a Service market is small in absolute terms — credible estimates range from $0.5B to $1.4B in 2024, growing at 15-19% CAGR — but it is the most legible piece of bilateral capacity coordination in orbit today. The fragmentation makes a neutral coordination layer between operators and ground infrastructure both necessary and possible.

Vertical integration without interoperability is exactly the gap a neutral clearing layer fills. Operators are already paying the coordination tax bilaterally; the post-trade infrastructure that makes it cleared, neutral, and auditable is what becomes inevitable underneath. The fragmented operator-and-ground-station seam is where the v1 cleared downlink market lives.

In November 2025, Starcloud launched the first NVIDIA H100 into orbit. In December, the same satellite ran the first in-orbit large language model and performed the first in-orbit LLM training run. On February 4, 2026, the FCC's Space Bureau accepted SpaceX's filing for an orbital data-center system of up to one million satellites (DA 26-113); Starcloud filed for an 88,000-sat constellation the day before. By April 13, 2026, TechCrunch reported the largest orbital compute cluster open for business.

The merger of SpaceX with xAI and Starcloud's published compute partnership with Anthropic created the shape of the orbital compute market that follows: two vertical stacks. One Musk-aligned, one NVIDIA-anchored. Both will route compute intra-firm where they can. The other half of the demand — hyperscalers procuring outside their own footprint, defense and intelligence buyers requiring jurisdictional neutrality, sovereign AI programmes, ground-station operators settling downlink against compute output — needs a neutral CCP.

Compute is the demand catalyst that pulls every other Wavestar market forward. Every Compute-Hour delivered creates a downlink-minute of egress, an ISL-Gbps-hour of training-fabric backhaul, a Ku/Ka spectrum-hour, a hosted-payload slot, and a recurring propellant/ISAM demand for the constellation that hosts it. The Compute-Hours market lives at /markets/orbital-compute.