Swiss town approves SpaceX antenna project

Leuk municipality approves SpaceX antenna project Keystone-SDA

The Swiss town of Leuk has brushed aside opposition to installing 40 satellite dishes from Elon Musk's company SpaceX.

+Get the most important news from Switzerland in your inbox

The rejected citizens’ committee has announced its intention to appeal to the Council of State, according to Swiss public broadcaster RTS.

“Our association and 25 other interested parties received a letter from the local council on 28 November stating that the objections had been rejected”, explained co-presidents Hanna Schnyder-Etienne and Roman Kuonen in a press release issued on Monday.

+ Swiss village divided by SpaceX anntennae plan

With the building permit now in force, the citizens’ collective, which takes a dim view of the project’s materialisation, has already announced that it will appeal to the Council of State. “The appeal is being prepared”, it adds.

Various reasons given

Opponents are raising concerns about the environment (electricity consumption, light pollution), health (electromagnetic radiation) and data sovereignty (control by a private company).

Launched several years ago, Starlink is a network of low-earth orbit satellites that provide an Internet connection in remote areas or areas with no communications infrastructure.

SpaceX claims to have more than 6,750 satellites in orbit and more than five million subscribers. The company is now looking to set up in canton Valais, in Leukerbad to be precise.

These 40 LEO (Low Earth Orbit) dome antennae, around 2.5 metres high, will form part of a future ground station for the Starlink satellite network developed by SpaceX. This would be one of the largest enclosures of its kind in Europe.

Provisional concession granted

Elon Musk’s company applied for a radio licence from the Federal Office of Communications (OFCOM) at the beginning of the summer.

“On 9 October last, OFCOM granted Starlink a radiocommunications test licence authorising it to use the frequency spectrum for test and development purposes”, the Office stated in response to a request from Keystone-ATS. “The purpose of this licence is to test under real conditions new radiocommunications equipment, technologies or systems for which international standardisation work has not yet been completed.”

“A regular licence can only be granted once the legal bases for frequencies for gateway connections to satellite constellations have been defined in Switzerland and Europe. This is not yet the case for the Leukerbad installation”, concludes OFCOM.

Translated from French by DeepL/mga

How we work

We select the most relevant news for an international audience and use automatic translation tools to translate them into English. A journalist then reviews the translation for clarity and accuracy before publication.  

Providing you with automatically translated news gives us the time to write more in-depth articles. The news stories we select have been written and carefully fact-checked by an external editorial team from news agencies such as Bloomberg or Keystone.

If you have any questions about how we work, write to us at [e-mail]