FCC Issues Warning in Wake of Swarm's Unauthorized Launch

So, would an American company selling Kinder Eggs in Poland be in trouble for breaking FDA regulations?

It's still weird that the FCC is the responsible US agency, which was discussed here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16555810

Not sure that's true. A sibling comment suggests the opposite -- that the party that launches the satellite is responsible. I did a little digging, and some discussion around the text of the Outer Space Treaty appears to suggest that India is responsible for it[0].

[0] https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/25981/might-isros-...

A. Swarm did what was necessary with the current state of law. It's in the spirit so I say they get a pass. Safety amongst other spacecraft is separate issue.

B. FCC will try to go overbounds--there's no law stopping them too.

Quid Pro Quo is all I have to say aside from it's exciting there's a DIY spacecraft community!

Both India and Spaceflight Industries agree that they won't launch anything from the US without a US license. This is a company that lied to everyone involved.

> Maryland

Delaware?

That cannot exclude local enforcement.

> If it's illegal to, say, hack into your competitors servers and steal all their intellectual property, you don't get to mail a server to somewhere with weak IP laws, and then do all the theft.

Wait, why not?

"Move fast and break things" is a problematic motto if it applies equally to your product and work culture.

Move Fast and Start a Kessler Syndrome Cascade?

Move fast and break other people's safety.

Then yeah, that seems pretty irresponsible to put other people's property in danger and potentially lives if they're within distance of the ISS.

And what is it made of? These satellites are tiny. Unless they are made of more exotic materials, they will not survive reentry.

> that could snowball into destroying more things in orbit

It even has a name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome

I think you heavily overstate the difficulty and cost of diverting a spacecraft, especially in the case of cubesats, which in general do not have any propulsion systems to do the delta-v manuevers you state. For collision avoidance for cubesats, realistically you just change the drag profile to bring the spacecraft into a higher or lower orbit. While this can in some cases have an impact on lifetime, they're not generally going to be manuevers away from their existing orbit enough to change performance or reception characteristics as the new orbit is always going to be an orbit that the spacecraft would be expected to hit anyways.

Additionally, as other comments have alluded to, part of the FCC requirements that these spacecraft have to meet is a maximum deorbit time, which is (I believe) 25 years. For satellites as low as these ones were, that period will be lower.

I'm all for the FCC throwing the book at this company, but just want to make sure we don't have misconceptions as a community about what or why these things are regulated and how they work.

It can be tracked, just not 100% of the time.

But here's the thing. Momentum. If you've tracked it once, you know its location for many months to come.

There's a lot more nuance here and that video is misleading in several ways.

Starting with the weakest reason first, but one that's also very important. Space is really big. There are some 6 figures of tiny things in space and thousands of larger things. This sounds pretty scary. But now imagine that we put 6 figures of tiny things, and some thousands of large things in random places in the US and set them on a random path. You can intuit that the odds of any collision are going to be extremely low. And now imagine the entirety of LEO. It is magnitudes larger than the USA of course.

The next is that objects tend to be going in the same direction. Rockets take advantage of Earth's rotation to get a 'head start' on their launch which means that most things end up going in the same orbital direction. Two things going the same speed with the same orbital characteristics will never collide. With different orbital characteristics, they will get two chances for collision per orbit with an extremely low chance of it occurring by chance.

And maybe the biggest point is another really cool and counter intuitive part of space. When we think of the USA we obviously just think of the ground. But of course there is a vertical axis in space. And the awesome thing here is what determines your altitude in space. It's entirely based on your velocity (well and the mass of whatever you're orbiting). In other words, objects cannot collide unless they're traveling at the same rate of speed. Pretty neat!

Another issue is that even at LEO, objects do experience some atmospheric drag. Any object in LEO that is not occasionally correcting its orbit (accelerating) will eventually come back down to Earth. This includes all of that tiny debris.

So now make the US absurdly vastly larger. And create multiple layers of the USA where any given car traveling at any given speed goes on a specific layer. And set them [almost] all in the same direction. And finally remove small stuff (or 'decommissioned' cars) over time. So sure, space debris is something to definitely keep in mind - but I think people don't really realize how relatively irrelevant this is. Another thing is that even if we did experience some catastrophic kessler syndrome level event it would mostly have no impact on things going through LEO (and not orbiting within it) simply because the massiveness of space just means the odds of an impact are so very low. So it would not kill space travel as the video states.

And lastly, necessity is the mother of all invention. There are an enormous number of viable ideas for removing debris from space. But there hasn't been that much of a push for them simply because it's not really necessary yet. If we reach a point when it becomes necessary, there are solutions.

So issue? Sure. "Massive" issue. Nah.

> perhaps these tiny satellites could be allowed to self-track (using GPS)

Not so sure GPS would work well up in space, given that the signals are aimed down at the planet's surface.

Where do you think the "gravitational pull of the earth" ends? Hint: the moon is inside the gravitational pull of the earth... The danger is that things in orbit have velocity. A lot of velocity. Taking that nice F=mv^2 equation in mind you can imagine what would happen if a piece of space junk were to hit something we care about (or hit something we don't care about and create a lot more little pieces of junk that are now spreading out to cause more mayhem.) Space is big, and earth orbit is also a very big place, but there is still a lot of junk whizzing around up there and increasing the odds that something you forgot about will hit something you care about is counter-productive.

> can you please explain why it would be bad to "pollute" space? Do things fall back into the atmosphere and burn up and sprinkle ash back onto the earth?

The risk of space junk falling on people is tiny. The chief concern is around collisions in orbit. Worst case: "collisions between objects could cause a cascade where each collision generates space debris that increases the likelihood of further collisions," which could create a "distribution of debris in orbit [that] could render space activities and the use of satellites in specific orbital ranges unfeasible for many generations" [1].

These regulations are about protecting affordable access to space, by managing the risk of collisions.

(Eventually, yes, most things will fall down or burn up or drift away. But that process can take years if not millennia.)

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

Objects can stay in orbit for a long time and become dangerous for other objects there. Look up Kessler Syndrome.

Generally, because the debris might hit other stuff and break it.

Space is big, but too much stuff goes into very similar orbits.

I’am positive someone expressed that exact sentiment about the ocean at some point. I had a Botany professor who always used to say “there is no such place as away”.

One of my favorite "slice of life" anime series out there is PlanetES[1]

It does a great job of illustrating the potential impact of this on humanity in the not too distant future, and some of the jobs it creates (space trash collectors).

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

Things don't really leave the gravitational pull of the earth -- it's still on the order of 9m/s^2 in low earth orbit. In order for things to stay up, they've got to be moving around 9 km/s sideways -- essentially constantly falling towards earth, but going fast enough sideways to miss.

The issue is that at those speeds, anything bigger than a fleck of paint hitting anything else will turn both things into a bunch of tiny chunks. See [1] for an example of two satellites colliding.

The big fear is that if you get enough stuff up there, even if you control most of it, one collision would be enough to trigger a chain reaction. [2]

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_satellite_collision [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome

okay, but what is your point?

The concern is the precedent. If we let people just put up anything we could end up with (worst case) Kessler syndrome.

The concern, as expressed by the FCC, is that the satellites are so small they are hard for U.S. Space Command to track them. Which means we could approve a rocket launch where one of these rapid little beasties knocks out a window or causes other catastrophic damage because we didn't know where it was precisely.

And you could argue it's too small to do damage (not true) or to low to be a real concern (maybe true), but the precedent is dangerous to allow.

The great thing about small satellites is that they are light and cheap and easy to launch. However, once they get to space, they take up just as much room as everything else: one orbit. Space isn’t a parking lot where you can park the smaller things closer together, and not being able to track the small satellites just makes that problem worse.

> none who will do so in violation of ITU rules.

I bet North Korea doesn't give a shit about the ITU rules.

Check out Glenn Martin in ‘To raise heaven ans Earth’. The amount of freedom these inventors needed and took advantage of would be much harder to achieve today. That’s exactly the point - they were able to test, build, fly, improve their ‘dangerous experiments’ without local, state or Federal government stepping in.

I didn't see novalis78 mention air traffic regulation, just regulation.

According to the regulations of the time, early air pioneers were perceived to be trespassing. See for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuius_est_solum,_eius_est_usqu...

Nowadays it may seem obvious that aircraft are not trespassing when they are flying over us, but it was not obvious at the time. A future regulatory regime for satellites could also conceivably see it as obvious that satellite design shouldn't be limited by the ability for them to be tracked by a common tracking system, but rather have a goal to avoid collisions through other means.

He didn’t say “air traffic regulation”, he said regulatory environment. Barriers today would range from safety regulation to disturbing endangered gnat breeding to neighborly noise complaints.

> The idea that putting satellites in LEO is some sort of brand new never-before-done thing that deserves wide latitude for greenfield engineering is crazy. Hell, I've owned a GPS receiver for about 20 years!

GPS (along with the other major navigation satellite constellations) are in Medium Earth Orbit.

LEO is about to become a lot more crowded, thanks to cheaper launch costs and miniaturisation. What was previously done with MEO and GEO satellites can now be done with LEO constellations, with the advantages of being closer to earth.

Some proposed constellations in LEO number in the thousands of satellites, which is unprecedented:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_constellation#Commun...

What is "a society". Who makes those rules? How far away from the will of the sovereign is the latest ABC..XYZ agency? Who oversees the regulators and law enforcement in a transparent way? Can/should one country's official dictate what other countries do or who they launch into space?

> We're the largest backers of the ISS, have the largest civil and military launch industries, have the largest concentration of private launch and satellite companies and are one of a handful of countries in the world with a civil space agency.

And while we're #1 in overall spending we're second to Russia in terms of percentage of GDP. Considering our military budget is more than the next 10x countries combined and considering we pay into that budget regardless of our GDP I'd say we're putting in minimal effort. You're also giving credit to the US government for research, engineering, and labor that was done by private industry. That's where this problem becomes a problem.

Our government can't keep up with private innovation. We've got a car company who can make a car that gets 120 MPG but the DOT won't let it through the red tape because their required emissions testing equipment isn't sensitive enough to read it's emissions. So you deny the car and tell the company to come back with a shittier one they can read.

So instead of letting innovation happen, we're going to stifle it because we, ourselves, don't want to do our part to regulate it properly and in a timely fashion.

> A U.S. regulator regulating an American satellite, made in America by American engineers working for an American company, whose orbital damages are the liability of the American taxpayer, is being too internationally ambitious?

So when your private sector tech outpaces your public sector's ability to regulate it you just disallow advanced technology and keep regulating the same way you've always done? That sounds exceedingly bureaucratic.