CEO Says Launching Satellites Without FCC Permission Was a ‘Mistake’
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Replicate SEC civil penalties. Swarm gets fined, the company that brokered the launch gets fined, and the person who submitted the FCC application (hopefully the CEO) gets fined. In addition, the person who submitted the application and the company are barred from registering new satellites for N years.
If the CEO represented, to the broker or the Indian government, that she had the necessary approvals I'd also hand the case to the DoJ for criminal prosecution under anti-fraud statute.
I'm a huge believer in the commercialization of space. Going renegade in LEO is like flying around without registering a flight path (EDIT: bad analogy, more like drilling in a city without a permit). Eventually you'll have a horrible disaster, and it will have been because you were impatient with a straightforward process.
Rules are very different if you're outside A,B, and C airspace.
Unlike airspace, things put in orbit are permanent on the operational timescales. They also have limited, if any, capability to dodge other objects. It's more like development of a zoned piece of land, except if you build too close to another structure, both buildings explode.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-11_Kennen
Note the orbital inclinations, all between 90 and 100 polar orbits in the 250-1000km range (LEO).
Once up to medium orbits (GPS, 22,000km) or geostationary (42,000km) risks become minimal to nothing. Space up there is huge, the relative speeds much slower. It is an open question whether collision between sats is even relevant considering the risk of colliding with any number of natural objects.
Not that I think we're anywhere near that point, but it's important to realize why these regulations are important and why they must never be ignored. Down the line, someone's decision to rush a mission due to market/shareholder pressure could rob many generations of their final frontier.
There is plenty of natural sat-shredding material up there now. In most orbits there is more natural material passing through than man-made. Earth is hit by over 100 tonnes of natural material per day. Take the sphere of orbits, and many thousands of tonnes pass by daily, far more than the mass of the sats up there. If we turned all the sats into sand, it wouldn't increase the collision risk in comparison to the shower of natural debris we already deal with.
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/asteroids/overview/fastfa...
I don't think people are really worried about GEO-height collisions, but there's already lots of stuff flying in LEO, with much more to come in the near future.
--
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_collision#Artificial..., under "Unintentional high-speed collisions between active satellites and orbital debris"
And once you open door to reckless processess the chance of Kessler Syndrome rapidly shoots up, especially considering upcoming exponential growth of satellite count. (OneWeb, SpaceX)
Swarm can easily re-incorporate in the less regulated country, re-open developer office in the California, and launch all they like without fed's oversight.
If Swarm's satellite smashed into a French satellite and Swarm was unable to pay, the American government would have been liable (together with the Indian government) for the damages. This is how ITU rules work. Same for radio interference.
> Swarm can easily re-incorporate in the less regulated country
Most countries are ITU members. Certainly every one with spacefaring capabilities. Furthermore, the CEO may have trouble doing her work in another country under American anti-arms trafficking rules (e.g. ITAR and EAR).
I've done a good amount of work in the small and micro-satellite spaces. Regulatory overreach is a problem, and the ITU is more bureaucratic than it needs to be. But the paperwork piles up with the FAA and Air Force (and is invoiced in the form of launch fees), not the FCC. Had the CEO consulted with a lawyer and radio engineer, she would have had no problems. Instead she took a shortcut.
There is precedent for this sort of thing, for example it's illegal for Americans to go overseas for the purpose of having sex with minors.[0]
0 - https://www.justice.gov/criminal-ceos/extraterritorial-sexua...
"...there is no liability clause in ITU regulations..."
Space Safety is No Accident: The 7th IAASS Conference edited by Tommaso Sgobba, Isabelle Rongier; page 97
https://books.google.com/books?id=YVLMCQAAQBAJ&pg=PA97&lpg=P...
Unless I'm misreading something, I don't think anyone is assuming that (or are you making a deeper point about the dollar as a world reserve currency or something?).
For my part, I also don't understand why the FCC has de facto authority for launches (as contrasted to the de jure authority for transmission).
It's one thing if your social networking app goes down for a bit or someone's favorite feature is broken, it's quite another to do something that can have severe negative consequences (in this case, for humanity at large) if something goes wrong.
Let's stop treating "the rules don't apply to me" like an innovative business idea, and call it what it is: behaving like a child.
YouTube, Buzzfeed, Imgur. Borrow enough content until you have the revenue to generate your own.
When you look at the details of this case, it really doesn't paint a picture in the way you're interpreting it.
Edit: Explaining for the down-votes. The orbit these things are in are easily managed and outside of major space traffic zones. The size of the satellites means they will all burn up on re-entry. Also, see my comment here:
One, it isn't overreach. Certifying and registering satellites is the FCC's legal duty. The threat comes from untracked satellites becoming untracked orbital debris. This is the same reason we register flight paths.
> something that FCC doesn't do and doesn't have any insight into assessing
The international organization that deals with orbital registration and regulation is the ITU [1]. The FCC is charge with managing our interactions with the ITU because, historically, all satellites were communications satellites. The FAA clears launches (not satellites). (Air Force supervises launches. USSPACECOM hasn't really existed since it was merged into USSTRATCOM in 2002.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Telecommunicatio...
What is limited to geosynchronous satellites? ITU jurisdiction covers low-earth orbits because the risk from orbital debris and radio interference is not limited to GEO. Partly as a result, FCC jurisdiction is not limited to GEO.
Regulation of LEO is very important not because of how bad things are, but how bad things will become if it is left unregulated.
The bigger risk now is that, after completely ignoring the FCC's rejection, other companies decide "we don't have to worry about the FCC at all because even in egregious cases, the penalties are light."
Like sure, if you're making a social media app... break the shit out of it... but it's not a good idea when a minimal QA process can slam your car into a wall.
I doubt that SpaceBEES will be as transformative as the automobile, but, approval or not, there they are in space.
(Also, it's the FCC that's the government agency involved here. The FCC does not regulate space travel, they regulate radio frequency assignments.)
Space, similarly, might have been "move fast", but "break things" was limited to risking lives of people participating in each individual project.
I suppose the original meaning of "move fast and break things" involved only breaking your own things, but this meaning evolved, and when used to criticize today startup culture, it connotes breaking other people's things.
There's no responsible argument for "move fast and break things".
"Drop dead gorgeous": lead poisoning in the 18th century because of lead makeup.
Antibiotics: resistant "super-bugs'.
Plastic: fills the oceans and clogs terrestrial ecosystems.
Internal combustion engines: pollution.
Farming: habitat destruction.
Hairspray: holes in the ozone layer.
Easy long-distance travel: non-native invasive species.
Computers and the internet: mass surveillance and cyber-crime.
Split the atom: made bombs.
It is far past time to learn from our mistakes and think carefully about the shape of our desired future.
Edit: Clarification, TEL is as you said, TetraEthyl Lead.
100 years after the first electric car:
> ...Thomas Parker built the first practical production electric car in London in 1884.
~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_car#History
Horse manure is a resource. Too much of it in the wrong place was the problem. Car exhaust is deadly. People commit suicide with it.
Electric vehicles have the potential (no pun intended) to be powered from non-polluting energy sources.
My point still stands: we don't live in the best of all possible worlds in large measure because we refuse to think carefully and deeply about what we value most and how to achieve it.
Look at the map of ITU member states [1] and tell me where you'll find this spacefaring nation.
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/33/Member_s...
"Taiwan, Province of China, is not listed separately in the UN M49 but included in China." [1]. It is an unofficial member, however, which is why you can dial +886 to get to Taiwan [2]. Practically speaking, with the U.S. providing Taiwan its security umbrella, enforcement mechanisms for a Taiwanese breach of ITU protocol would be straightforward.
[1] https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-D/Statistics/Pages/definitions/re...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_relations_of_Taiwan#Te...
If you're launching out of Western Sahara, it strongly implies (a) you're doing something naughty and (b) procured your equipment through illicit channels. The reasoning behind (a) is you'd spend vastly more on (b) trying to do this out of Western Sahara than you ever would on compliance in an ITU-member nation. The reasoning behind (b) is export controls.
I thus presume the response would be military (i.e. detainment, not blowing things up). This would probably be the responsibility of whomever you're a citizen of, or whomever gets angry enough about you. (In Western Sahara, probably NATO, Algeria or Morocco.) The more realistic concern is someone bribing officials in an ITU member state.
There are 12 countries capable of launching satellites and technically it’s more like 10 since Iran and North Korea can’t launch anything substantial just yet.
And those two which are the closest thing you can have to a space launch capable “rogue” nation have the most interest to actually behave since they are essentially launching a ballistic missile with a small payload and if they do it without notice well some countries in their vicinity might not wait long enough to find out what it is.
Iran and North Korea are both ITU members.
Because we have international agreements in order to establish behavior that is best for all countries involved. And there would likely be diplomatic solutions presented to bring any new spacefaring nations into agreement with everyone else.
It seems to me (obviously a layman) that the cost of bad PR that would come out of that would outweigh the cost of paying out in the incredibly unlikely circumstance it happened?
Of course, the cost of bad PR is also pretty immaterial since it's so unlikely to happen so I can't imagine it was given much thought.
> the cost of bad PR that would come out of that would outweigh the cost of paying out
I think you overestimate the impact of bad PR, but if the appropriate foreign govt is paying, they could likely dodge any problem. Also, they can always choose TO pay if the PR is bad enough.
Only bitcoin eclipses the amount of regulatory uncertainty that surrounds satellites in the US. There are clear international law reasons that the US government approval is required for launch, but there is absolutely no statute that gives the FCC authority to deny the launch on the grounds that they did -- it's a regulatory power grab on that agency's part, trying to assert regulatory authority they were never granted. The FCC rejected the launch on the basis of tracking ability, which is something that FCC doesn't do and doesn't have any insight into assessing. If it was spectrum or comms, my assessment would have been different. However right now the satellite regulations are really in flux due to the rise of commercial space and uncertainty about space force reorganizations, etc.
FCC asserting authority over orbital trajectories (vs. say, the FAA or US Space Command who HAVE been the point of contact on those issues for decades of military and NASA space launches) is an inter-agency regulatory power grab. FCC has handled domestic issues regarding geosynchronous satellites, because those are nearly all communications related. Now they're trying to unilaterally extend that to ALL Earth-orbital trajectories.
What do you do when your local Parks & Rec department sends you a letter rejecting your claim of special tax status on your import/export business? That's basically what happened here.
US STRATCOM does space situational awareness work now (US Space Command was dismantled in 2002 as part of post-9/11 reorganizations, and most of its responsibilities were handed off to STRATCOM). STRATCOM _is_ currently legally mandated to interface and share data with commercial entities for traffic management purposes. However I don't believe they have or ever had any regulatory or licensing powers. STRATCOM also seems eager to pass their situational awareness responsibilities off to either the FAA or DOC.
The FCC has been making the argument since the 90s that their charter to regulate in the "public interest" lets them take orbital debris mitigation into account when licensing satellites communications, and it's been codified into their administrative law. If congress or the president considered this a power grab, they've had more than a decade to do something about it. Trump is trying to make the DOC a "one stop shop" for commercial space licensing. However, I believe his executive orders still leave the FAA, FCC, and NOAA's current regulatory roles intact.
edit: initially had 2012 instead of 2002 for the year that US Space Command was shut down
Is this true?
This type of mesh network wouldn’t really be useful in America anyway.
Still, as evidenced by the statement of the supporters who put these on the Indian rocket, there are still many cross-nation gentlemen agreements about satellite placement. This should be viewed as a good thing (even though many nation states themselves can usurp the rules they set for their private sectors), but one assumes a more formal body will have to be introduced as the satellite count triples soon.
> This type of mesh network wouldn’t really be useful in America anyway.
Disagree unless I misunderstand the purpose of Swarm's tech specifically. But in general, satellite provided internet is currently the only high speed option for a significant rural population, many of which are paying over urban rates for much less. Or even as IoT sensors, again, rural settings benefit, something the US has a lot of. Where it that type of mesh would be less useful is in places with better terrestrial coverage. Also wise to approach the profitable markets first.
This is the ITU [1]. Its rules say countries are responsible for satellites (a) built by their companies and, to a more limited degree, citizens and (b) launched by their rockets.
India was supposed to check the satellite's clearance with the American government. If this satellite had caused any damage, the company, the U.S. government and the Indian government would have been jointly liable.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Telecommunicatio...
Yes, who cares about consequences for future generations, so long as you're clear of the angry jurisdictions! Hey, why not use that strategy with dangerous pollutants? I bet you could save a lot of money manufacturing without regard to those regulations.
The FCC ignores millions of part 15 violations every year and has allowed massive terrestrial RF noise pollution to become a major problem. This is not an agency that ever enforces much of anything, so it seems quite likely that this move was an attempt to protect crony firms with existing sats and incumbent business interests.
So if there's a Kessler Syndrome due to a proliferation of satellites in a class of orbits and payload sizes, due to an inability to enforce regulations, you just shrug your shoulders? Responsible innovators would first develop a means to detect those tiny sats. Corner reflectors aren't inherently heavy or costly.
so it seems quite likely that this move was an attempt to protect crony firms with existing sats and incumbent business interests.
That also seems likely.
This story reads like Silicon Valley hubris - break rules anyway because we know better. Why even have the FCC when random startups can create their own rules?
There's not much more details than that though, and no confirmation from FCC
The FCC is also probably just happy that they are being consulted at all. If this was done by a fully foreign company (or perhaps sold to a foreign shell company), then there would be nothing that the FCC could do about it.
If this were done by a fully-foreign company, the American taxpayer wouldn't be liable for its damages. If an American satellite crashes into a French satellite and the American can't pay, ITU rules make the U.S. government liable.
I've never heard of this happening. Source? If you're building a rocket, you're going to land a 3-letter agency inspection long before launch because of your procurement activities. (I've seen this happen twice, once in college and once at a rocket company.)
That said, if someone were literally launching a rogue missile, yes, that would light up NORAD and trigger air defense systems.
The article that we're responding to is about an unauthorised commercial launch.
The payload was unauthorized, but the launch was properly sanctioned by the Indian government. I read "unauthorized commercial launch" to mean "guy pops up a rocket without telling anyone and the military shoots it down," for which I was curious if there is precedent.
Satellites generally stay in their orbits, don't they? That's my understanding of the term "orbit". How would we determine that one satellite is guilty and the other isn't? Would it be whichever fired a rocket most recently?
Not really, as it's a rare occurrence. Though it does remind me of the time NASA got a AU$400 for littering in Australia with parts of Skylab..
https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/34928/did-nasa-...
> Satellites generally stay in their orbits, don't they?
They don't, the orbits decay due to drag from residual atmosphere, and other effects, including solar radiation. Generally, the lower you are, the faster your orbit will decay. Consider that ISS turns their solar panels to act as glider wings when on the night side, just to lower air drag. You can actually see their height chart here: https://www.heavens-above.com/IssHeight.aspx; you can see how they gradually lose altitude, and have to burn fuel to boost back every month or two.
Point being, satellites need to be actively tracked, and their orbits recalculated periodically. Each new object is a little bit of extra work for some people. The procedures are there to ensure this doesn't get out of hand, especially now with tiny satellites that are very hard to track.
> Through Swarm, Spangelo [CEO] sought to develop and launch a constellation of at least 100 small satellites.
Not to mention that if these devices turn into a community problem if they become LEO hazards. Making society pay for your 'move fast and break things' ethos doesn't sound right.
I wouldn't quite call it the norm, but it is certainly not unheard of in the smallsat industry. Fortunately this story is still an outlier in that they received a rejection first, but it wouldn't be bad to have a discussion on why companies are launching while still awaiting approval and see what, if anything, can change.
Anecdotally, what makes this particularly difficult for the companies involved is that they are generally secondary payloads without any say into when a launch goes, with requirements on delivery sometimes months in advance of a launch, and with launch dates that regularly slip months to years. For many companies, this gives them a highly uncertain date by which they actually need the approval, and the process isn't known as a reliably paced one. Sometimes your approval might be sitting in a queue and get bumped by SpaceX applying for licenses for their constellation, for instance.
It is a bit weird to me that the US would have jurisdiction over what a foreign rocket company outside the US, launches into space
The company, though, is US and therefore falls under lots of US regulation potentially.
Even otherwise, just because you can find a loophole in the system doesn't make it right - these approvals exist for a good purpose - there's real danger from orbital debris, so it would make sense to be a good earth citizen and ensure that everything is kosher before you launch.
The real solution that they should have done in this scenario would have been for swarm to simply sell their technology to an entirely foreign conpany that the US has no legal recourse against.
(Just like how I am sure that lots of foreign companies buy both parts and technology from US companies. Perhaps even entire satellites).
If Swarm Tech preferred to operate under another country's rules, they can move their business to that country (like you suggest).
Swarm Technologies is a US company. The FCC isn't regulating the launch, they're regulating the radio transmission. The company that launched the rocket did everything right, got paid, and isn't in trouble.
That doesn't matter if it's an American company launching the satellite. Third paragraph:
> FCC [..] the U.S. government agency that regulates all satellite launches by American companies, whether they occur on U.S. soil or elsewhere.
"Do it and ask for forgiveness later," has a threshold of acceptability, as a function of consequences. Generally speaking, loss of life is clearly beyond that threshold, obviously. Significant impacts on people's lives are also beyond that threshold, I would say. More specific to the topic: when your product involves the capability to implement an ICBM, you are probably dealing with energies that place the potential consequences of your product well beyond that threshold.
I know the "technically correct" answer must be yes, as there's some increase in chance, but what realistically is that chance?
However, as stated in TFA, the satellites turned out to be quite trackable.
Live tracking: https://platform.leolabs.space/catalog/L19943
> the SpaceBees have shown themselves to be easily trackable by the Space Surveillance Network, as well as by LeoLabs, a California-based company that provides orbital data to commercial-satellite operators and others in an effort to prevent collisions.
I'm not sure if "Space Surveillance Network" is the same thing as "Space Situational Awareness", but it does sound like the US Government is capable of tracking these things.
Radar also suffers from atmospheric attenuation, so there's a tradeoff between frequency, power, wavelength, etc.
I don't know what systems they're using to track LEO objects, but it's certainly within the realm of reasonable.
A decent primer: http://faculty.nps.edu/jenn/Seminars/RadarFundamentals.pdf
I'm going to guess here, but you might be thinking that orbits are permanent and space is empty, so once you observe the point of insertion, you can calculate object's position anywhere in the far future. This is very wrong. Orbits are unstable and decay with time, due to residual atmospheric drag, solar radiation, interactions with Earth's magnetic field, the irregularity of the Earth's shape itself, and other factors. All of these combine to the need for continuous active monitoring of space around the Earth, and recalculation of trajectories of existing satellites. A satellite needs to be trackable in order to be able to update its trajectory, as it changes naturally.
It's also technologically possible that they could have met the requirements, with a special size exemption from the FCC, by putting a radar corner-cube retroreflector on each corner of their tiny satellites, thereby artificially increasing its ability to be detected by radar, but they chose not to.
No. In this instance, it doesn't matter for this specific data to be parsed twice. The overhead would be minimal. But what if we stopped refactoring code and appended new feature onto existing code? What if we didn't bother to remove defunct API calls, and instead, we discard the old responses and just made new ones with new data?
That's why we don't just launch satellites. 4 (I think it was 4) additional objects 10cm across won't have much of an affect. The problem is when everyone starts launching satellites of various sizes no matter if they can be tracked or not.
EDIT: Thanks walrus01/mirashii for the EAR/ITAR points, very helpful
It might work if they get the whole company outside of the US, with no connexions left whatsoever, but then it will be harder to get VC money
That's been precisely the point of having the US Navy and the US Marines for well over 200 years!