The Trump Administration deserves credit for its National Space Transportation Policy, which calls for more than 1,000 U.S. launches and reentries a year by 2030, cementing American leadership in space for a generation. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is right to ask what it will take to get there, including the radio spectrum that rockets and aircraft depend on for communications, tracking and telemetry.

However, buried inside this same review is a petition that has nothing to do with expanding opportunity, and everything to do with a land grab. A commercial space trade group, the Commercial Space Federation (CSF), is petitioning to dismantle the longstanding coordination system used to manage spectrum for flight testing of America’s fighters, bombers, missiles, passenger jets, and advanced air mobility systems. The FCC should reject this petition outright.