Space and satellite regulatory counsel.

Start with the thing the two regimes do not share. In Washington the license is about spectrum and orbit: what a spacecraft may transmit, where it may sit, and what it must do at end of life. In London and Luxembourg the license is about the activity and its consequences: who is authorized to conduct it, what insurance stands behind it, and where liability comes to rest if something falls out of the sky. Both bodies of rules are called space law by the people who write about them, and by the companies hiring for them. They produce lawyers who cannot cover for each other.

The money follows the second regime more visibly than the first. Arthur J. Gallagher Specialty’s April 2026 space insurance update put total theoretical capacity up more than 15 percent on the first quarter of 2025, with deployable capacity around $300 million, and recorded the SpainSat NG-2 satellite a total loss insured for more than $400 million — a single event that moved the 2025 underwriting-year loss ratio from roughly 15 percent to roughly 75 percent. Insurance placement is a license condition in the European regimes, not a procurement exercise a general counsel signs off on afterwards.

Capital is not the constraint. Space Capital recorded $36 billion invested in the space economy in the first quarter of 2026 alone, in its opening letter of 14 April 2026. What is scarce is the person inside the company who can tell a board, before the money is spent, which authorization the business model actually needs and which regulator will decide it. That is a legal judgment made early, and it is the only part of this work that cannot be bought by the hour after the fact.

Across 1,300 structured interviews with Washington in-house counsel, 96 respondents sat inside satellite operators, launch providers, ground-segment businesses and space-hardware manufacturers over a rolling 24-month window. 71 of the 96 said their legal function had learned a material licensing condition after an application was filed rather than before it. Not one of the 96 described the resulting fix as cheap. The most common word in those conversations was not compliance; it was sequence.

SES is the cleanest live example, because it is Luxembourg-incorporated and FCC-licensed at the same time. Its careers portal, read on 3 September 2026, carried three Regulatory Affairs roles under the Team Telecom label, all posted on 19 August 2026: a senior specialist in McLean, Virginia and two specialists, one in McLean and one in Betzdorf, Luxembourg. On that snapshot the Washington-area seat count for this single function equals the Luxembourg seat count. The senior McLean requisition is built around national security agreement compliance — approval requests for equipment, vendors, personnel and transactions, security-incident handling, audits — and reports to a VP, Legal and Regulatory Affairs who is also the company’s NSA security officer. The Betzdorf posting describes its own job as coordinating with US national-security obligations while maintaining European operations.

Two details in those postings should change how a requisition is written. The first is the credential: the McLean role asks for a bachelor’s degree in accounting, business administration or engineering and five to ten years of compliance, audit or national-security experience — not a law degree, and not bar admission. A compliance-specialist tier sits below and separate from the Legal Counsel title, and a company that scopes only for lawyers will not find it. The second is the eligibility gate: a non-US citizen needs prior Team Telecom approval to hold the role, so nationality filters the shortlist before experience does. The adjacent national-security market has its own version of that problem, treated at length in our read on clearance-gated legal hiring; this page only marks that the two constraints look alike and are not the same thing.

Other operators label the function the same way. Eutelsat, which states 1,600 employees across 76 nationalities in 48 offices, carried no open legal role on 3 September 2026 but did carry a London opening posted on 23 August 2026 inside a job family it calls Spectrum and Regulatory Affairs. Vantor, the successor brand to Maxar’s imagery business, describes more than 2,000 employees globally and more than 1,300 cleared personnel, which tells a buyer that on the geospatial side of this value chain the dominant credential signal is a clearance, not a bar card.

And the reason one seat sometimes has to carry both is transactional, not regulatory. When SES acquired Intelsat — announced in April 2024 at about EUR 2.8 billion and completed on 17 July 2025 — the transaction needed sequential clearance from the UK Competition and Markets Authority in May 2025, the European Commission in June 2025 and the FCC in July 2025. One deal, three of the regimes this article names, inside roughly three months. The public record of the OneWeb transactions shows the same shape from the other direction: bought out of bankruptcy for £400 million in 2020 with the UK retaining a golden share, it left the UK and French governments each holding roughly 10 percent and a board seat after the Eutelsat merger. A company whose cap table contains two governments has already decided that one seat carries both regimes, whether or not it has hired for it.