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.
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.
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.
Edit: Clarification, TEL is as you said, TetraEthyl Lead.
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.
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."