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Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

Wow, I love this story. It raises so many intriguing issues in one small space.

First, while the FCC clearly has US authority over spectrum, how is it that its charter includes satellite launches? Or conversely, if they SpaceBees never turn on did they violate the license? And on what basis does the FCC get to evaluate the risk of other things in orbit, isn't that NORAD's job? And what if this had been a startup in Bangalore or Mumbai, would they be getting crap from the FCC for launching the very same satellites?

Now I understand the leverage the FCC can use with US based launch services, sort "Follow our rules and do what we say or we will have the FAA pull your launch permit." but that leverage doesn't really exist for foreign launch services. Heck the Russians might launch stuff like this just to irritate the FCC and tweak our noses.

And it raises a whole different set of questions about cubesats. How closely are they inspected at Integration time? Is is possible to create a cubesat that looks and smells like it is doing one mission but is actually doing a different mission? What happens when someone launches an orbital spy satellite network? Not the one you would expect taking pictures of people's back yards, but a collection of satellites with large lenses that are looking up and over at the things coming up from the ground. Imagine an ion engine powered small sat that works its way up to GEO and snaps pictures of all the satellites it can find and beams those images down to earth.

Let's say their quad systems stays under the weight of the typical cubesat limit of 1.33kg. That means they could launch 100,000+ satellites on a single F9 load. And while that would be silly (They would all be in a very similar orbit) it suggests how easily someone could (in theory) just "throw up" a covert microwave based communication network on a very small number of launches.

These are definitely 21st century sorts of problems :-).

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The short answer is that the Outer Space Treaty states that all commercial satellites are under the jurisdiction of the country in which the company exists, regardless of where they are launched. SpaceBees is a California based company, so the US government is the ones they answer to, not the country they hired to launch their stuff. Since satellites must communicate and could potentially disrupt the communications of others, the FCC gets a say in what goes on. The FCC is not the only authority in town, just the ones taking action here.

As far as satellites with covert missions or missions other than what is publicly stated, we should probably assume they already exist. The NRO is pretty sneaky and the USAF has never stated what the heck the X-37 is doing. There's a good chance that they have other satellites with publicly acknowledged missions that are doing something else behind the scenes. They are probably attempting to guard against that same behavior from others as well.

Doing optical imaging probably isn't feasible for a cubesat, it takes quite a bit of fuel to get next to another satellite and not hit it, so a cubesat can't zip up to dozens of satellites to get detailed images with a smartphone size sensor- it would run out of fuel too quickly. Instead, optical satellites will probably have their own orbit and accept that they will be far away from their targets. Large distances require a huge aperture if you want a good image, but it's not hard to imagine a satellite such as Hubble occasionally rotating to catch an image of Russian or Chinese tech. Plus, the NRO has sent up several very large payloads that we don't know what they do, so there's probably a large aperture imaging satellite snapping images we don't know about. What cubesats can do is extend long antennas that were folded up for launch. A small cubesat could be effective at RF surveillance and a constellation of cubesats and good signal processing could provide a surveillance system for other satellites that could spot various communication types and record the orbital information of the satellites doing the transmitting.

Not just the NRO: it's well known that the NSA operates SIGINT satellites, which have giant parabolic antennas used to Hoover up the RF spectrum aimed at areas of interest.

The NRO launches them and hands OPCON over to the NSA.

Couldn't they just open a subsidiary in a country that doesn't have very strict communications regulations?

Regulators and courts don't tend to enjoy those types of games. I wouldn't expect it to work so long as you maintain your actual business in the US.

> Doing optical imaging probably isn't feasible for a cubesat

Planet Labs' Dove satellites aren't much bigger than a typical cube sat (they're like 3 cube sats stacked together), have reaction wheels, and the "wings" have enough lift to be able to control altitude https://arxiv.org/pdf/1509.03270.pdf (page 9)

Putting on my tin foil hat.

> Is is possible to create a cubesat that looks and smells like it is doing one mission but is actually doing a different mission?

You mean like Zuma which SpaceX launched and then was declared as "lost" but might have secretly been designed to look like it was lost?

https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/9/16866806/spacex-zuma-missi...

Google a bit about the "misty" stealth satellite design that is apparently related to the NRO...

If you wanted to "lose" a satellite by launching it into a known orbit, you could design a satellite that is matte black, physically stealthy, with a very large supply of xenon propellant and ion thruster so that over a period of many months it could totally change its orbital plane into something new.

Plane change maneuvers are very expensive in terms of delta-V, but the US certainly has the money to launch things that have a thousand kg of extra propellant on board.

Or some combination of plane change and movement into a highly elliptical/molniya type orbit.

Thereby making it quite difficult for opposing nation-state level agencies to locate.

edit: the easy way to know if spacex screwed up or not is if they receive future "national security" launch missions. If no further such missions occur, and the feds continue shoveling money at United Launch Alliance, that would be telling.

> “Based on the data available, our team did not identify any information that would change SpaceX’s Falcon 9 certification status” after “a preliminary review of telemetry that was available to us from” the Jan. 7 launch, Lieutenant General John Thompson, commander of the Space and Missile Systems Center, said in a statement to Bloomberg News.

Wow, that was quick.

It's also entirely plausible that the SpaceX parts did their job and something the government insisted on using / was sending up didn't work as expected.

Since failure is always possible, including from various forms of human error, and is often exacerbated by extreme conditions (such as launching to space) it is quite likely that we'll never know for sure.

It really /would/ be nice if there was a mandatory sunset period for de-classification (which required /active/ effort to keep reviewing and punting classified status forward).

>It's also entirely plausible that the SpaceX parts did their job and something the government insisted on using / was sending up didn't work as expected.

The payload adapter was not the SpaceX built hardware SpaceX usually uses, but was built by Northrop Grumman

Musk says he fears AI. I hear that since it was invented. And still most robots that fell cannot get up.

In terms of my life and future of my children, I am not afraid of AI, Mr Musk. I am afraid of you launching top secret government payloads, one after another.

I'm afraid of both.

Your argument is one I've heard many variations of. Ive never found it very convincing. Here's why:

20ish years ago, when I started my career, Google and Facebook didn't exist. Amazon sold only books and was considered a bold experiment. No AWS. People argued about whether linux would be ever be used in production. The iPhone didn't exist. Wifi was a newish spec, but most people getting online (which wasn't most people!) relied on modems, or isdn if you happened to live in certain places. There was no "internet of things" - heck "information superhighway" metaphors were finally starting to phase out, and the average American would still talk about The World Wide Web so awkwardly you could hear the capital letters. Self driving cars were total sci fi that could never happen because it's hard, plus who would you sue? (Plus cest la change, plus cest la meme chose)

(I might be off by a year or two, but the point remains)

I entered the profession about 20 years ago and have seen all of this change. At my age, I can expect to be in the industry for most of the NEXT 20 years. Before I even retire. Given that the rate of change accelerates - https://ddcvqwvagfyuw.cloudfront.net/content/uploads/2015/12... - we have no idea what to expect by then, but can expect it to be very different, all while we are still struggling with how to deal with the impact on society that faster travel and communication introduced from before I was even born.

Do I think AI will exist and turn on humanity in that time? Can't say. AI predictions have been notoriously bad. (Usually overconfident, but also in the other direction. 20 years ago it was obvious computers would be able to beat any grandmaster in chess sometime in our lives, but go was considered to be something dramatically past that.

So I don't know if it will happen or even be able to happen. But I'm not convinced by anyone pointing out failures in current tech. That's like saying human flight can't happen because a lot of people failed at it, or that cars won't replace horses because they break down too much. Tech changes and it is change at a growing rate.

To cite a metaphor: if you have a pond. A lily pad gets there. Next day you see there are 2. 4 the next day. Will they overgrow the pond? If you wait until the pond is half covered to worry about it (e.g. 20 days), you have only 1 day to handle it before 'maybe' is proven 'yes', not 20.

You have been in the industry 20 years, I have been in the industry nearly twice that and as far as AI is concerned, it is a no show. Certainly we have systems that can play games, we have systems that automate factories and other processes, but none of these are AI.

As humans have no understanding of intelligence and certainly not human intelligence, their ability to create an artificial one is effectively non-existent. Compared to the existing natural biological systems that we find around us, we cannot even duplicate their simplest processes with any aplomb. Our attempts are extremely inefficient in all areas, energy, speed, production purity, etc.

If one looks around, one will see much change occurring. Yet, in so many ways, little changes. People remain people, the problems that plague people remain the same the same. If anything, our technology is only speeding up the rate at which these problems are occurring. Much of this is because we don't actually sit down and ask if we should be doing something at all.

Just because we have varying success at developing various kinds of technology, doesn't mean we actually have the wisdom or understanding to use that technology properly or that we will achieve duplication of intelligence in a non-biological system.

In regards to your pond analogy, instead of using exponential growth, I think we could say that it is logarithmic growth.

>And still most robots that fell cannot get up.

They have started to[1].

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVlhMGQgDkY

a "matte black" spacecraft would get very very hot, too hot for most electronics and be detectable with an IR camera. ion thrusters use significant power and would require a large and visible solar array. misty would be technically possible but a motivated adversary would probably be able to find it. stealth spacecraft are difficult.

I think you could use black body radiators on the other 5 sides to bleed the heat from the side facing the sun.

those black body radiators(doesnt exist) will be visible in the IR...unless you can get them down to 3K to blend in with the background. Running a spacecraft that cold is pretty impractical because all the bus equipment uses power and any power=heat. Any power generation will be hot, rtg or solar.

they will be IR visible, but what do you mean they don't exist? Apollo used them to bleed off excess heat.

"A black body is an idealized physical body that absorbs all incident electromagnetic radiation, regardless of frequency or angle of incidence." [0] Black bodies are theoretical, they do not exist. Apollo had radiators, they might have been black but they were not a black body. Vantablack comes close to a black body for the visible spectrum which is p cool tho.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_body

> Black bodies are theoretical, they do not exist. Apollo had radiators, they might have been black but they were not a black body.

they were, as I said, "black body radiators" which are not theoretically ideal black bodies, but still manage to radiate black body radiation.

I think the term you're looking for is simply "radiator."

yes that is more parsimonious however in non-technical language the term "radiator" is associated with heat exchangers. if you put heat exchangers on the sides of your spacecraft they would function as radiators so I suppose it doesn't matter anyway, arguing semantics is a waste of time.

a "radiator" is a heat exchanger and "radiator" is the industry standard term. these semantics are required for effective communication about technical topics.

One could perhaps build a large flat reflector to shield it from the sun's rays and angle it in such a way to not reflect sunlight or radar signals back to earth-based receivers. But I don't know the extent of space radar systems, maybe there are transmitters and receivers spread around widely enough that that would not work.

Like the JWST?

Yes but maybe larger and angle to present an oblique surface to earth based and perhaps orbital radar and telescopes. Although I suspect this world be harder than it sounds due to the number of such radars likely in orbit.

There have been black spacecrafts, like the Polyus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyus_(spacecraft)

A majority of the exterior surfaces on spacecraft are black, gold or OSR. The black or gold however is multi layer insulation. Where the outboard surface would get hot and the inboard surface would be cooler. Where the OSR surface is your radiator area. Regardless, all visible in IR.

The issues were apparently with Zuma, not with the Falcon 9. So the question is if Northrop Grumman screwed up or not. The feds are unlikely to stop shoveling money at them even if they did screw up.

The USAF figured out how to detect such satellites back in the 1980s.[1] The Ground-based Electro-Optical Deep Space Surveillance (GEODSS) looks at the sky with three 40-inch telescopes per site. This automatic system has a big star catalog, and can detect when something blocks its view of a star. The telescopes are some distance apart, and so they can see time differences between something occulting a star and compute range. The multiple telescopes allow disambiguating problems such as clouds, aircraft, and birds.

If something looks interesting enough, one of the telescopes is switched to laser mode, and a laser flash is used to illuminate the target. Even black objects reflect some light.

GEODSS was the first fully computerized telescope system, and it generated far more usable data than film-based systems. One of the old GEODSS sites was used to look for near-earth asteroids for years, and found most of the known ones. Now, of course, everybody has multi-megapixel imagers on telescopes and enough computer power to analyze the results.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Space_Surveillan...

Unless they were painted with VentaBlack?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vantablack

I wasn't aware that let stars shine through solid objects.

“If something looks interesting enough, one of the telescopes is switched to laser mode, and a laser flash is used to illuminate the target. Even black objects reflect some light.”

I was referring to this part.

That wasn't the part about finding satellites, though.

And 99.965% absorption is still visible in a bright light.

There's an interesting demonstration of this on Youtube:

"The Worlds Blackest Black vs The Worlds Brightest Flashlight (32,000 lumen)—Which Will Win?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AaFdCvnV8PM

To summarize, the flashlight wins, and it's reasonable to expect the effect would be the same with a laser and sensitive detection equipment.

@zak (sorry, I couldn't reply directly)

That isn't Vantablack as such though, is it? Afaik, Vantablack proper requires a specific application process [1], which I've mentally envisaged as being something akin to growing diamonds in a lab on a substrate, or applying flocking to materials.

I'd be quite curious to know what the reflectivity would be like on some clever coating consisting of vertically-laid carbon nano tubes, etc.

[1] - https://www.surreynanosystems.com/vantablack/applying-vantab...

Have to use a negative index of refraction metamaterial cloak

The stated failed element was Northrop Grumman separation module, so there's no way to tell really.

> First, while the FCC clearly has US authority over spectrum, how is it that its charter includes satellite launches? Or conversely, if they SpaceBees never turn on did they violate the license? And on what basis does the FCC get to evaluate the risk of other things in orbit, isn't that NORAD's job? And what if this had been a startup in Bangalore or Mumbai, would they be getting crap from the FCC for launching the very same satellites?

It's just an expansion of their mandate happens all the time. Instead of creating a whole new department just to regulate launches adding it to the department that will be issuing a license anyways (anything worth putting up is going to be transmitting down so pretty much any launch will have the FCC looking at it already).

As for the rest it's really hard to do much of anything covertly in space, if it's above the size of a softball the DoD will pick it up on it's space monitoring sensors. Same thing with changing orbits unannounced they'll know within at most an orbit when the object suddenly is not where they expect it to be.

In the end the answer is could you? Yes, theoretically. But you'd have to find a launch company willing to host you and prey you have somewhere good to hide/a host strong enough to protect you because you're going to piss off every single country with a space program.

If the thing about the dods tracking capabilities was true there would not be satellites that are lost and found decades later by amateurs

If the dod tracking is really fantastic, the smart move might be to not demonstrate it remotely publicly.

Remember when the NRO gave NASA two space telescopes no one knew they even had, bother where comparable in scope/complexity to Hubble.

> NRO gave NASA two space telescopes no one knew they even had

The only reference I can find for this says the NRO satellites won't be launch till 2020. They're not up in orbit.

[0] https://www.space.com/16000-spy-satellites-space-telescopes-...

My point was that the NRO had the resources to build two Hubble level telescopes that no one knew they had until they handed them over, an agency with little oversight, large amounts of cash and very few leaks.

If they are handing over that kind of technology I wouldn’t rule out them having some amazing tracking stuff we know nothing about and won’t for a decade or two if ever.

Hubble's tech isn't particularly impressive any more. NRO having 2 spare is more a sign of just how much money is sloshing around over there than anything else I think.

"the thing about the dods tracking capabilities" is true. They know what's up there, down to lost tool bags.

The instances you're thinking of are either "lost" as in "presumed dead" (like IMAGE) or non-Earth orbit probes (like ISEE-3). IMAGE was never untracked, and ISEE-3 was never supposed to be tracked (but its location was still known.)

If you're talking about IMAGE it was known where it was NASA just didn't know that it was still transmitting. IIRC the discoverer actually used the orbital elements to determine what satellite he was seeing. They still had an active and accurate TLE for it they'd just stopped checking because NASA thought it was dead in space after the eclipse a couple years ago failed to reset the broken power supply. [0]

[0] https://skyriddles.wordpress.com/2018/01/21/nasas-long-dead-...

> It's just an expansion of their mandate happens all the time.

At least we now know that Pai's talk of scaling FCC back to let the legislators decide was untrue!

> Is is possible to create a cubesat that looks and smells like it is doing one mission but is actually doing a different mission?

probably yes, but as 99.9% of cubesats have no thrusters or maneuvering capability (yet), and their initial TLEs are known. It's pretty easy for a nation-state space agency or air force (USAF, UK, most large EU countries, etc) to aim a two-axis motorized tracking VHF/UHF antenna at them with a spectrum analyzer to figure out at least what frequencies it's communicating on. Even if everything is encrypted.

It's not as if any cubesat currently has the capability to change its orbital elements or do anything other than act as some form of radio Rx/Tx, or maybe operate a very small telescopic camera system.

I'm always hyper intrigued by the question of inevitability when it comes to space junk prohibiting our future ventures beyond the planet. At what point will Kessler syndrome occur? Is it inevitable or are we able to track all meaningful satellites with such precision that it's less of a problem than an annoyance?

I wonder if it's cheaper to fix it later or prevent it now. There might be huge opportunity cost today if we obsess over garbage collection prematurely.

Vastly cheaper to postpone now just don't send junk up, but the problem is mostly limited to keeping satellites in space not simply leaving earth.

Even then in LEO you get enough drag to limit risks and the worst case ends up as a trade-off of safety vs continuous fuel usage. Remember, space is vast but satellites and space junk are both really fast and stay up for a long time. Prevent junk from staying in your orbit and the risks dramatically decrease even more so if you add maneuverability. Even better LEO prevents your satellite from adding to the mess long term.

At some point it would be possible for an entity to either launch (or more likely refine in space) enough materials to focus sunlight across not /quite/ the earth, but the orbital paths. Since 'light pressure' exists, this could be used to counter existing acceleration and thus encourage orbital decay.

It would take a while, it would be costly to start up, and boy does this sound like a weapon from 50% of space sifi stuff I've ever read or seen...

However I suspect it's still the cheapest solution to the issue.

If it can push a satellite down from a great distance, and likely seriously heat it up and damage at a shorter distance, it is a weapon, the same way a knife or an axe is a weapon.

It's the way you use something that makes it a weapon.

Things are what they are, not what our arbitrary categories classify them. A knife is a tool and a weapon at the same time, and it can be a great number of other things, a cultural artifact, a piece of industrial design and a piece of junk, all at the same time. A thermonuclear warhead device can be a doomsday device and an essential tool for Mars terraformation.

So it's not the way you use it that makes a weapon, a weapon remains a weapon throughout it's non-violent uses; the oldest trick in war is to disguise weapons as tools before using them in an attack. See nuclear proliferation under the guise of atomic energy, the militarization of space, Hitler's powerful 'defensive' army.

It may sound like a pedantic distinction, but in practice, the fact that something IS a weapon, regardless of how it's being used, will drastically alter decisions. Imagine an unknown person coming at your family with a knife or ax in hand. Under the "not a weapon until used as such" doctrine, the burden is on you to prove the agresive intentions and you have no logical reason to be concerned until then.

I feel we are actually pretty close to being able to clean up the space debris. My optimism stems from the lowering cost of getting to space, the availability of light weight space avionics, and vacuum usable adhesives. Small, persistent, delta-v changes can be applied to space junk with lasers and from devices which attach themselves to the junk and lower a tether into the magnetosphere and energize it with a solar cell. Further, on orbit refueling on 'cleaner tugs' becomes more interesting with enough xenon gas stations. NASA did one of their challenges about space junk and it had a number of very creative ideas that were predicated on lower cost access to space.

There are real plans to attempt this, at least on some smaller scale.

Astroscale is one example: http://astroscale.com/

I would guess that their jurisdiction was written into law because of the predominant role of telecommunications and media in the commercial satellite launch market.

My knowledge is more certain about the international situation - the US has jurisdiction over its own objects because the Outer Space Treaty gives each party to it the right (and responsibility) to regulate the objects its citizens launch into space. I'm actually curious why the US decided that it was their job to regulate satellites launched by India but owned and operated by US citizens and corporations, but India seems to agree (because they didn't try to do the licensing for these satellites).

Another issue: vertical boundaries of the national borders. If something flies 400 miles above the US, is it still in the US?

No it's not.

As long as the satellite is behaving itself, it can fly over any country and will not be subject to any laws from that country. The Outer Space Treaty was set up in part to clarify issues like this (also to keep nukes out of space). The US has no authority to restrict operations of an overhead satellite- which is good, because then they could prevent satellites orbiting in some of the most valuable inclinations. The only instances that I know of where a country did anything about an overhead satellite was China, when they blinded a satellite with a laser from the ground and when they tested an anti-satellite missile on one of their own satellites.

The US has also destroyed two of its satellites, P78-1 Solwind in 1985 and USA-193 in 2008.

> The only instances that I know of where a country did anything about an overhead satellite was China

Then it's not a categorical "not". And what happens when the satellite is not "behaving itself", as you put it?

Then again, where does the border lie? Limit of space? 10 miles? 50 miles?

We have an interesting gray zone here, folks. Where there's a gray zone, there's a lot of money to be made.

Just because you don’t know where the border is drawn does not mean it doesn’t exist.

Naturally. Do you know where it exists though?

Because the Kármán line is not the border.

It's still a categorical "not" as far as international law goes. There are no competing treaties that other countries have signed with different interpretations of the fair use of space. Just because China (and the US, as other replies have pointed out) has broken the rules doesn't change the fact that they are still the rules. A satellite that is behaving itself is one that isn't violating the OST- generally that means not interfering with other satellites and their missions and not carrying nuclear weapons.

62 miles (100 km) altitude is where the border lies.

This is not a gray area at all and there is no money to be made by violating the OST. If you start a company in a country that has signed the OST you will be held to the rules. Any country that isn't a signatory to the OST doesn't have a robust space program and will likely still require you to follow the OST because there will be strong international pressure on them. Even if a country did allow you to violate the OST you wouldn't have a viable business because all the economically developed countries of the world have signed the OST and won't do business with someone that is interfering with their access to space.

Laws and treaties aren't magic. Countries break them all the time and often get away with it.

China wasn't really punished when it blew up a satellite, and I doubt that was allowed by the treaty.

The better question, though, is are there any MOTIVATION to break the treaty?

Well there certainly already was motivation for china, I there is certainly motivation for other countries to engage in weapons testing. Especially if they could do their weaponization without being noticed. I doubt that every rocket in the world is checked, top to bottom for weapons.

> 62 miles (100 km) altitude is where the border lies.

This is incorrect on several levels (which, of course, did not prevent you from downvoting my post):

* The Outer Space Treaty does not have a definition of the boundary. Here it is, go ahead, look it up: http://www.unoosa.org/oosa/en/ourwork/spacelaw/treaties/oute.... It's hardly a "law" (technically, a treaty is not a law either), more of a set of guidelines and some more concrete restrictions to solve some Cold War issues.

* You are referring to the Kármán line (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kármán_line) which is commonly referred to as a boundary between the atmosphere and the outer space.

* On the other hand, the United States considers an "astronaut" anyone who has flown over 50 miles (80 km) above the surface.

You already see the discrepancy, don't you?

Most importantly though, both "boundaries" are merely working benchmarks, without any legal authority.

The actual boundaries are determined by national laws. I have no doubt that many, if not most national laws have no such boundaries defined at all. (Heck, if the US doesn't have a solid definition, then who does?)

Finally:

> It's still a categorical "not" as far as international law goes

What is that "international law"? Not the Outer Space Treaty, I presume? If you seriously believe that China openly violated a specific law, I'd be curious to know what law it was.

Generally speaking, "law" is an enforceable set of rules. The "international law" is, sans special cases like war crimes, a misnomer.

Even if we look at something more mundane and reachable like maritime borders, which are more or less firmly defined, they've been disputed a bajillion times (for example, Spratly Islands) or simply ignored or "freely interpreted" (Russia's Arctic exploration).

I maintain, we have a gray zone here.

Yes, sometimes there's a gray zone about the edge of space.

But those heights are well below the height you need for a stable orbit.

Anything orbiting multiple times is in space, and nobody will argue.

So in the context of satellites, you're wrong.

Are you another eager downvoter without reading?

The context is about the vertical extent of the national borders, not the edge of space.

Who says the vertical border ends with the edge of space? Once again, the vertical extent is not defined. Say, tomorrow they come up with a Skylon-like contraption that will be used in civil aviation. That would give a reason to the national governments to redefine the notion of "airspace".

> Anything orbiting multiple times is in space, and nobody will argue.

And how do you know that? Once again, with the example of China, nobody could come up with counterarguments precisely because it's undefined.

Would you comment on this please: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airspace#Vertical_boundary ?

Legal paper using the expression "gray zone": https://scholar.smu.edu/jalc/vol81/iss3/3/

I guess the first questions have the same answers as: if a boat crashes on another in international waters?

only difference is that satellites can remain aflot years after their owners bankrupted...

The state from which they launched (presumably with permits) is fully responsible for the damages. I.e. if they allow smallcorp inc. to launch a tiny cubesat; if that cubesat hits something important and causes $1 billion in damages, then that country is liable for the full amount, no matter if they can recover that money from the (likely bankrupt) company or not.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Liability_Convention

It also raises a bunch of issues around:

- Kessler Syndrome, a la "Is the plotline of Gravity inevitable with increasing commercialization of space?"

- Weaponization of space. If you could get 4 unauthorized satellites up on a launch that was forbidden because "they're a danger to other satellites", could you do the same with satellites that are intentionally a danger to other satellites? Could a private company knock out the U.S's spy satellites at just the moment they are most needed? Could it set up its own spy network?

- How about ABM defense? Could a private company create a network of smart space junk with the purpose of stopping a potential nuclear war before it starts? (Incidentally, such an organization could end up in the position of both saving humanity and opposing U.S. national interests, given that the U.S. has the largest stockpile of nuclear weapons on Earth, which should make Americans wonder if U.S. national interests are aligned with humanity. Crimson Tide was a great movie.)

- More generally: nation states have traditionally had a monopoly around certain technologies. Spaceflight, weaponry, cryptography, communication networks. That monopoly is fraying, or in some cases, has already frayed beyond repair. What does that mean for the power balance on earth, and for social organization on the planet? There are some private organizations that are arguably more powerful than full nation-states nowadays.

21st century sorts of problems indeed. At least the 21st century looks like it'll be exciting, if somewhat scary.

> Given that the U.S. has the largest stockpile of nuclear weapons on Earth

[1] Russia has the largest stockpile of nuclear weapons on Earth.

[1] https://fas.org/issues/nuclear-weapons/status-world-nuclear-...

Largest stockpile of weapons that work?

Maybe? Only one way to find out really.

Decommission them all; then you will know for sure.

The only winning move is not to play.

If nobody is left does that count as finding out? If a tree falls in the woods...

how do you even prove that

Several inspections and basic statistics.

It is also a bit of a strange comparison since the weapons produced today are hundreds of times more powerful than the ones produced sixty years ago. It seems like the US or Russia will prominently decommission old bombs and people will hail the lower number of nuclear weapons but in reality the total amount of destructive force in the nuclear arsenal long term is the same or greater.

Weapon yields are much, much smaller nowadays than in the 1950s and 60s.

The highest-yield US warhead was the 25Mt Mk 41, retired in 1976. All warheads in the inventory now are in the sub-Mt range, mostly around 150 to 300 Kt

Back then ICMBs were accurate to several miles, necessitating large bombs. Today they are accurate to meters. Not only you could do with smaller bombs, but it's feasible to attack many more targets. The destruction potential of today's nuclear arsenal is significantly larger than it used to be, although it uses smaller bombs.

Your link seems ambiguous on that point, with 1710 deployed nuclear warheads for Russia vs. 1800 for U.S. (I used the word "stockpile", but realistically, only deployed warheads count since nuclear war has a tendency to be over in an hour.)

Regardless, if you're Russian you should also carefully consider whether your national interest aligns with the continued existence of humanity, at least as far as nuclear weapons go.

> Regardless, if you're Russian you should also carefully consider whether your national interest aligns with the continued existence of humanity

Putin said, just yesterday, that he sees no reason for the world to continue to exist without Russia. He was strongly impling that Russia would not hesitate to use nuclear weapons if threatened.

I don't think this really raises the Kessler syndrome argument. The bigger question is: what was the FCC so worried about it crashing into and is that object classified?

There have been PocketQube launches which are smaller than these satellites which in theory got licenses.

The problem is that these are small enough that they couldn't be reliably tracked if they stopped transmitting. As for PocketQubes I only see one that's been launched as the smallest 5cm cubed version most are >=1.5u. I'm guessing the 2.5cm smallest dimension was too small combined with the proposed orbit, I bet they're more willing to accept poor tracking on objects that won't be there long.

They're not too small, as they seem to be actively tracked by AFSPC and others.

Also, there are estimated to be hundreds of thousands of pieces of debris smaller than these satellites. It's not clear that four more satellites are really going to raise the risk bar that much.

They can be tracked but the FCC was concerned about how reliably they would be tracked.

> Also, there are estimated to be hundreds of thousands of pieces of debris smaller than these satellites. It's not clear that four more satellites are really going to raise the risk bar that much.

Yeah but intentionally putting up more is still not a good idea.

Nation states might not have a monopoly on the various technologies they gave birth to, but they still have the advantage in terms of budgets and non-profit status.

Source: Working for a nation-state funded science lab.

Not to mention recognized sovereign with de jure ability to physically regulate activity within its borders.

- Kessler Syndrome, a la "Is the plotline of Gravity inevitable with increasing commercialization of space?"

Kessler Syndrome wouldn't stop us directly. If we absolutely had to, we could use air breathing electromagnetic thrusters to keep extremely low orbit satellites aloft.

https://phys.org/news/2018-03-world-first-air-breathing-elec...

However, if global warming requires us to do geoengineering, such a handicap might well result in the extinction of human civilization.

There are some private organizations that are arguably more powerful than full nation-states nowadays.

There were private companies that basically owned some 3rd world countries in the 20th century. This situation probably still exists to some extent.

>There were private companies that basically owned some 3rd world countries in the 20th century. This situation probably still exists to some extent.

Just one example that never seizes to amaze me:

By 1803, at the height of its rule in India, the British East India company had a private army of about 260,000—twice the size of the British Army.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company

Was East India Company really independent from the government? Wikipedia says [1] in 18th century the government effectively had control over those territories.

I think the idea was to allow private investors to colonize new territories and later seize control from them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company#East_India_...

> Was East India Company really independent from the government?

It had an army, larger than the one from its home country. AFAIK, it was officially not independent, but what difference does the official title make?

The fact that nominally WIC "had" the army doesn't necessarily meant that in the case of conflicting orders it would obey WIC, as the Indian armies were run by British officers who also had sworn loyalty to the King/Queen.

I think it was not independent, it might be just a trick to make government not responsible if soldiers did something bad.

Russia has way more nuclear warheads than US. This has been true since later stages of Cold War (although the gap has narrowed a lot since end of Soviet Union, Russians used to have about 40 thousand nukes in mid 80s). What they lack in high tech and quality they make up with much larger quantities. It’s also a part of strategy to overwhelm any sort of anti missile defense US might have.

Aren't those mostly tactical nukes?

I would assume as to the matter of regulatory precedence or domain, that if you're broadcasting radio within US airspace, then by definition you are subject to FCC licensing requirements.

Sort of, as low earth orbit is considered "international" space much like the oceans are further than 200 miles from a coastline. Or look at Radio stations that broadcase into the US. There used to be an FM station in Mexico that I could listen to at night between LA and Vegas because it was broadcasting way more power than the US would allow. But in that case it wasn't being operated by "US persons". And as an amateur I'm familiar with the rules the FCC has for me operating a space station, and they would pull my ticket if I violated them. However that leaves the question of the satellite. And the classification of it being a 'rogue'.

If you have enough money and clout you can fling your old car into space.

> And what if this had been a startup in Bangalore or Mumbai, would they be getting crap from the FCC for launching the very same satellites?

Oh yes, it's a whole big thing! See: https://www.fcc.gov/international

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