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Comment by tempestn | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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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