Comment by olympus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by olympus | Hacker News Reader

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It's possible that they have nobody on their team with any government experience nor space experience. This is a fairly common way that startups fail, they think they have a great idea but are unfamiliar with the regulatory environment they must operate in (banking and medical startups are particularly vulnerable). Consider that a cubesat launch costs about $40k, add in $10k for the satellite cost, you're looking at just $200k to launch these satellites. Add in a spare system or three, multiply by a generous margin of error, and you're still under half a million bucks. That's basically the same as hiring a couple employees. To further realize that they could be doing this on the cheap, these are apparently 0.25U sized cubesats, which are even cheaper to launch than the "standard" 1U size: http://space.skyrocket.de/doc_sdat/spacebee.htm

They don't necessarily need to be a huge team with a bunch of experienced industry insiders to pull this off. They could just as easily be a couple of recent grads with some of Grandma's inheritance from selling her house in Palo Alto.

But it sounds like the co-founders both do have significant space industry experience. Maybe not directly with the regulatory aspects, but a little bit of common sense...

I would argue that their actions indicate they don't have the experience they would like people to believe- not that I blame them for that part, every founder should try to make themselves look better to investors. They could be padding their resume or even outright lying, but anyone who says "it's no big deal if our license got denied, we'll launch without addressing any of the issues and try to work it out later" is not an industry veteran. Trying to keep to a timeline by going around the established process isn't what professionals do. Even Elon Musk plays ball with government regulators while pushing his ideas.

Edit: the article describes them as an engineer that developed a satellite concept for Google and the other sold his previous company to Apple. Neither of them have experience in this regulatory environment. Neither Google nor Apple are space companies. These founders are going in on the tech aspect of distributed computing in space, I doubt either has launched a satellite before.

> "it's no big deal if our license got denied, we'll launch without addressing any of the issues and try to work it out later" is not an industry veteran.

Uber did that, in a different industry, and has had success. I'm appalled by the behavior, but perhaps others are following their model.

What's the worst case scenario for Uber? Economic destruction of taxi medallions, company gets shut down. What's the worst case scenario for Swarm? It takes out a satellite, causes economic destruction, and gets the military-industrial complex all mad at you.

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