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Comment by lorenzorhoades | Hacker News Reader

The problem with this statement is it worked, and gives me great hope in this company that they were smart enough to risk it. The FCC said no, you cannot launch the satellite you spent years developing for reasons that ended up being completely wrong. So, what is a company to do? Launch anyways and accept the backlash as they had no other option. Once the satellites launched, they were able to effectively track them and the company got approved for more launches but this time without the 900k fine.

As long as the regulations of the US don’t make sense, smart people will continue to break them in the spirit of innovation. Will this breaking of regulation always end in relatively little consequence? No, and soon the FCC or another regulatory body will feel obligated to make an example out of some company with serious charges and I will feel bad for the CEO and company that is used for an example

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This could have gone an entirely different way. I am glad it worked out but I do not gain respect or hope in a company because they willingly ignored a very serious regulation and the consequences of a failure on their part could have caused a big problem up there. Feels very amateur and irresponsible.

As some clarification I am all for breaking laws that can really only hurt the individual doing the lawbreaking. The government shouldn't have the right to protect us from ourselves. However, that this could have affected the other items in the payload or existing satellites in orbit if something went wrong is why I am disappointed.

The problem with "don’t make sense" is that very often they do but the arrogance/mistrust is stronger. Reading the comments on /r/robinhood is very eye opening. There is a big disconnection between the regulators and the regulated.

I think r/robinhood is a particularly bad example, the naïveté in that subreddit is overpowering. In general financial regulations are probably more good than bad given how completely irrational people get when money is involved.

> for reasons that ended up being completely wrong

When we were young lots of rules didn't make sense. As we got older we realized many of these were to keep us safe from things we weren't old enough to understand yet.

The US has quite a number of spy satellites that we can't detect, even with our own detection methods. Some are covered in vantablack and radar absorbing shields, others hide behind giant mirrors that reflect the darkness of space back down towards the earth.

How would your opinion change if a Swarm microsat had crashed in to a 6 billion dollar satellite and disabled it? What if it threw that bird out of orbit and it hit the ISS, killing everyone on board?

You can track a swarm microsat. The government could even help them make sure they orbited correctly and wouldn't hit the ISS. That's what good governance is. Bad governance is telling everyone no you can't do something unless we deem you worthy of our time.

These specific ones cannot be reliably tracked as they are smaller than normal cubesats.

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