SpaceX can't broadcast Earth images because of a murky license
cnet.com
cnet.com
The definition in the law even specifically excludes "Small, hand-held cameras shall not be considered remote sensing space system," i guess so that astronauts don't have to get a license 12 months before every mission. SpaceX cameras providing the video for the webcasts are certainly small and could be "handheld," so it seems to come down to the fact that no human is up there with them.
Remote sensing systems are a thing, and there are good reasons to regulate them. Tiny cameras stuck to the side of SpaceX rockets should not be classified as "remote sensing systems." When I think of remote sensing satellites, Landsat series and friends come to mind, not an off the shelf camera stuck on the side of a rocket.
I contend that my desire differs from parent comments claim
They don’t have that authority over things OTHER countries and their companies put into orbit.
I would say they should not generally be classified as "remote sensing systems." 'Cause you know someone would push things too far.
I guess abusing loopholes is the monopoly of authority.
I'm curious. What do you consider those to be? More importantly, do you consider the First Amendment to supersede these laws?
These are excuses and attempts to get press. Nothing more.
SpaceX told NOAA that they were recording, NOAA didnt know, they are short staffed. This let SpaceX complain about 'not being able to record'.
Knowing that SpaceX is Elon's PR company for Tesla, its just another way for him to get in the news without doing anything.
I question if they were waiting on 'using this' for a bad mission. One where they didnt want to show the video, but still get press points.
SpaceX has always been a very heavily marketed company. You should be skeptical whenever they get headlines.
I don't understand how SpaceX deserves any more skepticism than any other company's headlines at this point.
Or a piece of bureacracy in order to harass anyone we want, anytime we want.
Also.. an "Act" on what to do in Space? Seriously? So when that thing flies over (e.g.) Japan should it follow Japan's laws? Or we only count the base location? In which case movie it to (e.g.) Greenland and problem solved!
All these years of watching Star Trek universe (series & movies) taught me nothing!!!
First, there are quite a few very obvious reasons why it's in humanity's interest to regulate space missions. You want to minimise space debris, for example, because it could result in a series of collisions making near-earth orbits a wasteland you can't cross.
That's why there are rules on the size, structure, orbits, data sharing, disposal mechanisms and other features of space missions. These are set out in international agreements and enforced by the operator's country of origin. Greenland is a territory of Denmark, and your proposed "pirate launches" would be regulated by the European Space Agency. Problem (really) solved!
There's also stuff like the Outer Space Treaty, a valiant (and mostly effective) effort of international cooperation preventing a wasteful and dangerous arms race in space. Yeah, Trump seems to be reneging on that as well, go figure.
"Extremely small office" is simply a fact. There are three people working on this subject. Since most people will agree that SpaceX's videos really isn't much of a problem, nobody is actually complaining about past non-enforcement. Therefore, the lack of enforcement really isn't a very strong argument for increased funding, is it?
Providing a potentially understaffed office with the resources it needs isn't a "bribe". These people would not personally get any money. They are not asking for money from SpaceX or any other interested party.
Regarding this specific licensing requirement, a good read is https://www.nesdis.noaa.gov/CRSRA/files/15%20CFR%20Part%2096.... It's the result of a public deliberation and shows the different goals, stakeholders, and experiences underlying the regulation, and how they have to be balanced.
> All these years of watching Star Trek universe (series & movies) taught me nothing!!!
indeed...
Preventing space debris is not related to this topic in the least. Neither is preventing a "space arms race".
>Providing a potentially understaffed office with the resources it needs isn't a "bribe".
It seems to me that the best way to solve this problem is to get rid of this useless office.
>Regarding this specific licensing requirement, a good read is https://www.nesdis.noaa.gov/CRSRA/files/15%20CFR%20Part%2096...
I don't think it's good discussion etiquette to link to an unreadable wall of bureaucratic text and not give any context. I.e. at least state one good reason for this regulation.
The relation is OP's complete and naive refusal to entertain the possibility and usefulness of regulating private activity in space.
> It seems to me that the best way to solve this problem is to get rid of this useless office. > I don't think it's good discussion etiquette to link to an unreadable wall of bureaucratic text and not give any context. I.e. at least state one good reason for this regulation.
See: it's this attitude that keeps the level of such discussions at a kindergarten level. The linked document contains text, yes. But it's perfectly readable English. The first paragraph is headlined "SUMMARY" and contains this justification for the regulation and the office implementing it:
They are intended to facilitate the development of the U.S. commercial remote sensing industry and promote the collection and widespread availability of Earth remote sensing data, while preserving essential U.S. national security interests, foreign policy and international obligations.
You can easily find a later section entitled "Purpose" that expands on it:
(1) Preserve the national security of the United States;
(2) Observe the foreign policies and international obligations of the United States;
(3) Advance and protect U.S. national security and foreign policy interests by maintaining U.S. leadership in remote sensing space activities, and by sustaining and enhancing the U.S. remote sensing industry;
(4) Promote the broad use of remote sensing data, their information products and applications;
(5) Ensure that unenhanced data collected by licensed private remote sensing space systems concerning the territory of any country are made available to the government of that country upon its request, as soon as such data are available and on reasonable commercial terms and conditions as appropriate;
(6) Ensure that remotely sensed data are widely available for civil and scientific research, particularly environmental and global change research; and
(7) Maintain a permanent comprehensive U.S. government archive of global land remote sensing data for long-term monitoring and study of the changing global environment.
Those seem to be seven good reasons. If you want to argue their merit, you should start with a good-faith effort to understand them.
(1) Is dubious at best in this context, given that they do permit the first couple of 10's of KM up and only after that does this office's authority come into play. By then any imagery at HD video resolution of the United States has zero implication for national security. (2) and (3) are neutrals by my interpretation. And it actually flat out contradicts (4), (5), (6) and (7), since it isn't promoting it but actively tries to reduce it and blocks the public dissemination of the live streams they were already making available.
GGGPs arguments made no sense, yours are more verbose and seemingly better founded but they also make no sense.
This is just a nice example of a bunch of people with no actual stake in the outcome flexing their bureaucratic muscle, the equivalent of the little people behind government institutions little windows in places of 'public service' whose only role in life seems to be to ruin yours and to send you to another colleague behind another window.
> If you want to argue their merit, you should start with a good-faith effort to understand them.
That goes for you too, in particular for stuff you quote.
"The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) issues regulations revising the agency’s requirements for the licensing, monitoring and compliance of operators of private Earth remote sensing space systems under Title II of the Land Remote Sensing Policy Act of 1992 (the Act). These regulations implement the provisions of the Act, as amended by the 1998 Commercial Space Act, and the 2003 U.S. Commercial Remote Sensing Policy."
To me that looks like a trumped up reason, if there was any real concern then it would have been noted at launch #1.
More than likely, that's because the commercial companies who needed the license got the license.
> now that SpaceX comes along on their 50th+ launch it suddenly is a problem.
Probably because the technology on this payload fall under the requirements of the law to need it, and the company who owns the payload didn't get the license. Or, NOAA was unaware of the satellites until now and realize they need to follow up. Since they are a small shop and are not omniscient, that can happen.
EDIT: I misread the article, I meant the launches, not the payloads.
It's amazing how people can get from a description of that sequence of events to tinfoilhattery about bureaucrats "flexing their muscles" with "trumped up reasons". If anything, a logical explanation is probably the opposite: NOAA doesn't have enough control of the remote sensing licensing process to do a flagship government contractor the favour of forcing a license through, and certainly don't have the power to rewrite the law to accord to people's views that SpaceX's videos aren't sufficiently high resolution to matter.
"It appears that NOAA has recently decided to start interpreting or enforcing a decades-old law: "
So yes, SpaceX approached NOAA, as they should. And NOAA did not give them the required license in time for whatever reason.
Keep in mind that these launches are doing more for American goodwill and image right now than anything else the administration is doing and from that perspective alone they are worth a bit of leniency.
120 days to approve something that has been going on for the better part of a decade might seem reasonable to you but it does not seem reasonable to me, there is a segment of the population that feels that yellow pieces of paper are more important than reality but I'm not a part of that segment. Paper should serve the people, not the other way around.
I don't think it's ever "trivial" for a license-stamping body to make up a new kind of permit, particularly not over a three day period and when it's bodies like the Department of Defense they're cutting out of the picture.
Ultimately, if SpaceX wished to take the view that the existing law was not well drafted, not relevant to their particular filming, something they may have already breached without consequence and not in the US government's interest to pursue, they were perfectly entitled to take the risk of leaving the cameras on and seeing if anyone did anything about it. Quite why you think it should be incumbent on NOAA to breach the law on their behalf I have no idea.
Because up to that point nobody had shown any good reason why the license was required in the first place and 10's of launches had been done without the license. This is too little, too late and doesn't serve anybody.
No harm was ever done by transmitting low resolution images from space.
Anyway, enough indents.
I definitely agree with you on that, and I agree that the government can be over burdensome and take too long. However, NOAA is the one charged with enforcing the law on it, they did not write the law. If you disagree with the law, I encourage you to write your congressman and see what it takes to change the law.
I think there is a fundamental disagreement on the intent on what NOAA is doing. I personally don't see it as hostile, nor do I think they are flexing their muscle.
If it was true that SpaceX only came to them 3 days before the launch, I think that is unfair to NOAA to ask for a license so quick. If they did follow the 120 day policy and NOAA didn't give them a license, then the fault is on NOAA.
What I find odd is NOAA's own statement says: "SpaceX applied and received a license from NOAA that included conditions on their capability to live-stream from space."
So is SpaceX violating their license? I think there is much more at play when just what the article says. Personally, I have a feeling another government agency saw what SpaceX was doing, saw they didn't have a license, and NOAA got in trouble because they weren't enforcing that law, and now NOAA is caught in the cross fire.
More likely: they just woke up to the possibility of showing the world they exist.
> Probably because the technology on this payload fall under the requirements of the law to need it, and the company who owns the payload didn't get the license.
I don't see what it has to do with payloads.
> Or, NOAA was unaware of the satellites until now and realize they need to follow up.
It's not about the satellites, it is about the launches, specifically video from orbit.
I mean, the only evidence we've got is an article which quite clearly states that (i) SpaceX were the ones who contacted NOAA (ii) NOAA did not contact SpaceX regarding other launches, say it was SpaceX's responsibility to contact them and they don't think they have the resources to go chasing unlicensed remote sensing companies anyway (iii) Cameras on launches SpaceX carries out for government don't actually need permits anyway, which probably applies to a lot of SpaceX launches
So I'm not sure what gives you the confidence to confidently assert that it's "more likely" the precise opposite happened?
That is why SpaceX contacted them. If they had not and they had launched without obtaining permission and streamed the footage there would have been a nice 'gotcha' moment and they tried to avoid that.
> Cameras on launches SpaceX carries out for government don't actually need permits anyway.
So what's the point on restricting them on other launches? That proves this whole thing is high grade bullshit.
And yeah, also no dispute that the government grants missions planned by its own agencies a remote sensing license - can't imagine why you would expect it to be otherwise tbh? But agreed, enough indents :-)
First they state that NOAA only recently started enforcing this, then they talk about SpaceX applying belatedly and finally there is the whole confusion about the bit where NOAA's charter only comes into play when they reach orbit, which removes most of the reasons they could be worried about in the first place.
Even so, it is hard for me to imagine what DoD, NSA or CIA might have in terms of reasons why low resolution video transmission from space would be problematic, especially since for other launches the 'from orbit' videos are not deemed a problem and from where I'm sitting they are functionally identical and potentially more problematic (because they are government launches).
Broadcasting, at least to me, is not "sensing" - by the time images are broadcast, the "sensing" has already happened (even if by mere microseconds).
So it's nothing to do with recording.
#5: The forign policy / state dept / military parts of the US govt want to minimize potential risk of domestic US remote-sensing companies accidentally or deliberatly antagonizing a foreign government... seems prima facie reasonable.
To gain leverage during diplomatic negotiations, a foreign power could take the position that one of our "so-called" private civillian satellite companies was actually a front for a state intelligence operation. It would be difficult for state dept to provide evidence to the contrary if they didn't already have contacts with each private space company.
Is anyone aware of a diplomatic complaint ever being made along these lines? Maybe in the cablegate archives?
so effort will need to be made by pioneers in this area to shape US policy so it achieves the needed goals without being oppressive enough to shift to other sites
Now, do you have any arguments in favor of the regulatory restrictions on SpaceX lauch videos?
BUT: Exhaustively specifying all possibilities in law is rather impossible, and any attempt would make legal texts even more verbose. Giving an agency the leeway to waive regulations on a case-by-case basis may however appear (or be) arbitrary. Although I suspect the latter may still happen once the agency has had more than three days to think about it.
Otherwise, it may just be preferable for SpaceX to spend a few hours submitting the application. It's really not rocket science.
Really?
I suggest to stop using "PIIGS" as is a pejorative term to refer south European countries.
1) The idea that an NOAA regulation is going to stop somebody from acting militarily against the US. (A Chinese military command somewhere: "Sir! We cannot point our spy satellites at the earth yet because the US NOAA hasn't issued us a license yet!" "DRATS!")
2) The idea that somebody doing something nefarious would even be sharing this information with anybody.
3) The idea that any of this should be covering what is clearly a utility meant to display the effectiveness of a stage seperation.
This whole thing sounds like an April fool's joke to me.
And it's not as if we don't have hours of footage from those places at the same resolution already so whatever horse they're trying to keep in the barn has already bolted.
If only that was ever used to make regulation. We might have a decent copyright law by now in the US. I still blame Micky Mouse and Disney for all bad copy right law.
But I take your point that public interest is rarely the thing foremost on politicians minds when they create their laws.
That would suggest that public interest would not outweigh the rights of the licensing holders.
I wonder how that comports with this limitation on the U.S.: ‘Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press …’ Seems pretty cut-and-dried to me that if they launched the camera, they have a right to publish the photos.
I'll wait for you to report back on how that goes.
Weird how HN spends most of its time complaining about digital panopticons, CCTV etc and then is up in arms about the basic principle of regulating companies increasingly moving towards selling the ability to discreetly take images or video of any area at any time. (I can see the logic in excepting low res SpaceX launch videos from that and doubt they'd have had any problems at all if they'd applied for a license in time, but you draft regulations for the rules not the exceptions, especially when there's only a handful of companies to license)
1080p wide-angle is not quite large scale in terms of space imagery
If the agency requires everyone to get a license, they can filter out the people doing shady stuff.
Granted there's not many people sending rockets into LEO.
The people doing shady stuff are either the US government (who will give themselves permission) or other country's governments (who won't even ask permission). So what exactly does it prevent?
That should have made it clear for you :)
And TOS, for that matter.
Here [1] are some statistics on how much legislation congress churns through each year. The last congress, in their 2 years, enacted 329 different laws, passed 708 different resolutions, and also dealt with a whopping 10,334 other pieces of miscellaneous legislation. And congress also has relatively few legislative days where this is taken care of. The house averages around 140 legislative days a year, the senate around 160.
And congressmen spend the vast majority of their time not dealing with legislation, but instead fundraising for their next election, which involves "donors" "lobbying" them on the issues that matter to them. It's a great system, isn't it?
That said, I think a simple lawsuit would settle this issue and help give clarity to the powers granted the NOAA. I expect a number of Cubesat experiments might get caught up in this escalation of power as well. And while you're more likely to get someone to say that a cubesat with a re-purposed 10MP cell phone camera is a "remote sensing" camera I think it would be difficult to convince a judge and jury such cameras were a threat to the national security, regardless of where they were pointed.
[0] http://www.noaa.gov/media-release/noaa-statement-on-todays-b...
Pretty easy for a nation-state to launch a surveillance satellite with much better optics, I imagine.
This is a list of nations that have managed to put something in orbit. It contains 10 nations, and the ESA. The vast majority of nations do not have the capability.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite#First_satellites_of_...
Non-space-capable countries do routinely put their payload on the rockets of countries with launch capability (though I guess then it can't be an obvious spy satellite).
https://www.nesdis.noaa.gov/CRSRA/licenseHome.html
I'm guessing:
* They don't want the satellite taking and selling photos of secret US government stuff (or Israel or other areas that would cause the US government grief). * They want to make sure the satellite doesn't crash or otherwise cause problems for which the US would be liable.
Meters per pixel. If it's >20, just give it blanket permission.
From what I understand the trouble point is when they hit orbit, and by then they're plenty far away to meet the cutoff.
If the license is required to sense remotely, the issuing agency can do some research, then tell the licensee "you cannot broadcast, transmit, or record for later transmission images taken from T+5:53:11 to T+5:56:43". And then they check the flight path, and that's when the vehicle will be directly over one of the Aleutian islands. The engineers shrug their shoulders, and program a 4-minute blackout into the cameras.
And the crew in Alaska can then go around throwing camouflage netting over everything, and inflate the decoys, and not do any work outside, during any times that an object known or suspected to have imaging devices on it passes overhead.
It's a temporary measure, as the superpowers continue to move their most important secret facilities to camouflaged, submarine, or underground facilities. But it won't be long before someone's cubesat with commercial-grade camera unwittingly images something it shouldn't, and the Men in Black visit the owner with a DoD order to classify all their electronic equipment as "Top Secret", with a "no-foreign" endorsement. It would all be confiscated, examined, scrubbed, declassified, and returned after a few months.
The license is likely so that the keepers of the secrets can know the imaging capabilities of some of the objects they track in orbit, and maybe get some cooperation from the owners.
SpaceX broadcasting from a camera attached to a Rocket
Boeing broadcasting from a camera attached to a Plane
Toyota broadcasting from a camera attached to a SUV
James Cameron broadcasting from a camera attached to a Submarine
It would probably not go over well if James Cameron broadcasted from directly under an American aircraft carrier, or next to a nuclear submarine
SpaceX put a camera up in orbit against the law. I suspect that NOAA was willing to look the other way when they did something borderline (2nd stage cameras), but now that they've pushed it too far they're not willing to cut them as much slack
I think SpaceX is doing cool, groundbreaking stuff, but they should be following the rules.
It's also an extremely good bet that NOAA also recently got an application from ULA. (https://youtu.be/FUJ9Dtyiclw?t=213)
With an effort, a large organization can be maybe probably mostly in the clear, but no amount of budget and perfectionism can get anyone definitely in the clear who is actually doing something.