According to the article/CEO, it happened before that other companies got the approval after launch.
There's not much more details than that though, and no confirmation from FCC
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.