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?
"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.
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.