FCC fines Swarm $900k for unauthorized smallsat launch (2018) | Hacker News Reader

FCC fines Swarm $900k for unauthorized smallsat launch (2018)

spacenews.com

17 pointsgballan8 comments

I really wish cities and other regulatory bodies were equally as zealous in their slapdowns of startup behavior. Airbnb, Uber, and the slew of scooter companies come to mind as doing the equivalent of Swarm’s behavior in their respective markets.

Hmm... Uber and AirBnB were 'first wave' where there wasn't even any precedence to charge or regulate them. Now we see a ton of regulations in specific cities for both of those companies.

As for the scooters, maybe you just live somewhere else, but where I am in, it was a fucking NIMBY nightmare. They were throwing them in front of tech / private transportation buses and into the water. They were all banned for about 6 months until legislation came out.

Kurzgesagt[1] convinced me that space debris will become a real problem if we're not careful. A "Swarm" of fist-sized cubesats whizzing around our planet at a few thousand km/h sounds like a nightmare.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yS1ibDImAYU

Possibly stupid question, but I've been wondering about this for a while:

Could space debris also make ICBM launches infeasible? If so, I honestly wonder whether the trade-off could be worthwhile.

Probably not, ICBMs don't need to attain a full useful LEO, they only need to stay in an orbital path for 1-2 orbits as current warhead delivery vehicles are configured. That would allow them to use an orbital path lower than any orbit that could be sustainable for debris.

Even if the current crop of ICBMs can't be configured to use such an orbit, development of such wouldn't take more than a few months.

FWIW, these satellites and others like them don’t really pose the threat you are referring to. They are designed to operate in a very low orbit that will decay in a couple of years, causing them to naturally burn up over time rather than remain as space junk.

Not enogh, they willfully ignored the FCC. They should be bared from launching anything in the future and the CEO should be fired.

That won't do any good, sadly, which is the system working as designed.

The violation is associated with the company, which can disincorporate, sell off all assets to a holding company, then reincorporate as a shiny new corporation pure as driven snow.

Criminal charges can only be applied to specific individuals; and each of those individuals you can bet are engineering their organizational structure to provide plausible deniability.

Our justice system is ill equipped to handle poor behavior by corporate actors compared with human ones. You can't jail a Corporation, and while you can kill one via revocation of charter, there is nothing to keep the same people from gathering together to do it again under a new corporate identity.

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