Hold on -- is the FCC an international body? I'm struggling to understand what Swarm did wrong here -- they launched from an INDIAN launcher after they didn't get permission to launch in the USA.
Seriously -- what power does the FCC hope to exert at this point? We live in a world where launchers exist in other countries ...
> hey launched from an INDIAN launcher after they didn't get permission to launch in the USA
The way ITU rules work, the country responsible for a satellite is the country from where it comes. Not from which it launches. (Launch providers are supposed to verify registration with a satellite's country, oversight Indian authorities failed to provide.)
Swarm's satellite was made in America by American engineers working for an American company. If it rams into a Chinese bird, the U.S. is responsible. Hence why the FCC is pissed.
Not sure that's true. A sibling comment suggests the opposite -- that the party that launches the satellite is responsible. I did a little digging, and some discussion around the text of the Outer Space Treaty appears to suggest that India is responsible for it[0].
The first paragraph of that question says 'address the possibility that a US company may have had spacecraft launched into orbit without the appropriate approval from the US government.'
This is a discussion of another offence against a different document and assumes the first offence against FCC regulations is valid. Be careful not to conflate the two, one causes the other.
> It's still weird that the FCC is the responsible US agency,
The International Telecommunication Union (ITU)"is a specialized agency of the United Nations (UN)" that "coordinates the shared global use of the radio spectrum, promotes international cooperation in assigning satellite orbits, works to improve telecommunication infrastructure in the developing world, and assists in the development and coordination of worldwide technical standards" [1].
If a single agency is to interface with the ITU, it makes sense for it to be the FCC.
> If a single agency is to interface with the ITU, it makes sense for it to be the FCC.
I don't see any reason for it to be a single agency. Not knowing anything about the details, I wouldn't think the FCC would be able to support the space-fairing expertise to properly regulate space debris given the dramatic increase in satellite density expected in the coming decades. New agencies get created all the time to deal with new regulatory fields that outgrow their initial home.
Needless to say, the UN is not a good lead to follow with respect to nimble regulatory structure.
> Needless to say, the UN is not a good lead to follow with respect to nimble regulatory structure.
I'm sure the world is waiting agog for your proposals for an alternative international body able to coordinate communication satellite frequencies and orbits across all nations.
Sure, it would seem more obvious, but that's the federal government. Why are the NPS and BLM under the DOI but USFS is under the USDA? Tons of USFS land borders NPS and BLM so it seems like one department in charge would make sense...
> Why are the NPS and BLM under the DOI but USFS is under the USDA?
Because forestry is agriculture with trees as the crop. While USFS lands are often used by the public recreationally in the same way as parks, they have a fundamentally different purpose that aligns exactly with the different government departments they are part of.
How do you fit the BLM in the mix then? Tons of grazing happens on BLM land. Quarries, mines, and oil/gas wells happen on both USFS and BLM land. Recreation happens on both. It seems like one agency administrating public lands makes more sense.
Different agencies results in different responses to the same problems, for example, white nose syndrome affecting bats in caves.
I'm going to guess NASA didn't want it or wasn't trusted to do so. They're rocket scientists, not trash men / women.
The FAA does planes.
It's like - I'm guessing - the FCC got it because the first non-gov satellites were for comms. It's not likely the Luddites in Washington DC would have anticipated the situations we have today.
> I'm struggling to understand what Swarm did wrong here
They're a US company not following US law.
> they launched from an INDIAN launcher
And? If it's illegal to, say, hack into your competitors servers and steal all their intellectual property, you don't get to mail a server to somewhere with weak IP laws, and then do all the theft.
> Seriously -- what power does the FCC hope to exert at this point?
Well, they can fine the hell out of Swarm (as the article explicitly states, so I'm not sure why you seem confused on this point)! That's what US regulators do when US companies violate US regulations, as (apparently) happened here.
> We live in a world where launchers exist in other countries
That doesn't do you much good if you aren't in the other country. If they wanted to not follow US laws, they probably should have moved somewhere else first.
> If it's illegal to, say, hack into your competitors servers and steal all their intellectual property, you don't get to mail a server to somewhere with weak IP laws, and then do all the theft.
Because you're still a US company which has to comply with US laws... As long as the US government finds you at fault, it can nab you and all your US assets if it pleases. Now, if you emigrate entirely and bring all your employees, assets and family and are okay with never setting foot on US soil again, then you can breach all the US laws you want
It's like committing mail fraud but sending the mail via a PO box in another country, or wire fraud and routing the call abroad. There's no magic pixie dust about the internet in cases like this, it's just another telecoms and delivery service and we've had those for a long time with settled law governing them.
According to the Outer Space Treaty (1967), which is still current international law and of which the USA is a signatory, the LAUNCHING STATE is the responsible party. The FCC is overstepping its bounds here.
This is just a company doing what any good company would do, shopping around for the best venue/set of rules for it's business. That's why companies physically located in Illinois or California incorporate in Maryland. Since India was willing to take responsibility for the launch, the USA (and FCC) is just out of the picture.
Both India and Spaceflight Industries agree that they won't launch anything from the US without a US license. This is a company that lied to everyone involved.
As the article points out, satellite operators are free to choose which nation's regulatory regime they launch under, but they do have to pick one.
If India freely made an agreement with the US to only launch FCC approved US satellites by US operators, that's India's choice. As it happens India didn't actually grant them a license to launch either, they just lied about having a US license, so technically they're probably in violation of Indian law as well or at least in breach of contract.
A. Swarm did what was necessary with the current state of law. It's in the spirit so I say they get a pass. Safety amongst other spacecraft is separate issue.
B. FCC will try to go overbounds--there's no law stopping them too.
Quid Pro Quo is all I have to say aside from it's exciting there's a DIY spacecraft community!
No because there's no law that says that American companies can't sell Kinder Eggs in Poland. There is a law that says they need FCC permission to launch satellites though.
Companies can be fined for what they do overseas. A prime example is the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act which makes it possible to punish American companies for bribery overseas, even in countries where bribery isn't illegal or where the line between bribes and processing fees is blurred. Additionally, I know it's also possible to sue a foreign company for something they did in a foreign land. The US in that case may freeze assets associated with company or the country as a whole if the they're pissed off enough.
It's a problem if your product is anything that actually matters. (Which is why several medical start-ups have wound up neck deep in shit in the last few years.)
> Swarm applied for an FCC license, but was denied on concerns that its spacecraft, being "smaller than 10 cm in one of their three dimensions," couldn't be reliably tracked by the Air Force's Space Surveillance Network.
And what is the concern around tracking them, inability to divert a spacecraft or satellite that might collide with a swarm of small objects?
Most spacecraft/satellites don't have onboard radar or other local scanning equipment, and "diverting" a spacecraft is actually a pretty complicated thing. This would involve multiple delta-v (using thrusters), both to avoid the object and then go back into their normal orbit. That could eliminate years of useful lifetime of a satellite, because those thrusters are usually used just for stationkeeping. Also, whatever orbit they are in is usually related to what the satellite is doing, so it might affect performance/reception/scanning/etc.
Just like the movie Gravity, if there was an explosion in space and you had a lot of small objects floating around in a cloud you can't detect, that could snowball into destroying more things in orbit, making the problem even worse. Right now there's no way I know of to clean up space junk in orbit other than waiting for it to burn up, which could take years or tens of years.
I think you heavily overstate the difficulty and cost of diverting a spacecraft, especially in the case of cubesats, which in general do not have any propulsion systems to do the delta-v manuevers you state. For collision avoidance for cubesats, realistically you just change the drag profile to bring the spacecraft into a higher or lower orbit. While this can in some cases have an impact on lifetime, they're not generally going to be manuevers away from their existing orbit enough to change performance or reception characteristics as the new orbit is always going to be an orbit that the spacecraft would be expected to hit anyways.
Additionally, as other comments have alluded to, part of the FCC requirements that these spacecraft have to meet is a maximum deorbit time, which is (I believe) 25 years. For satellites as low as these ones were, that period will be lower.
I'm all for the FCC throwing the book at this company, but just want to make sure we don't have misconceptions as a community about what or why these things are regulated and how they work.
I don't think I'm overstating anything. If you don't know you're going to possibly hit something, there's nothing you can do, and lots of small objects make it more probable you'll hit something you can't detect.
If you want to add some way to detect that you might hit something, it'd have to have some impressive range, as if you're in LEO going different directions with a 90 minute orbital period for each object, you have about 45 minutes to do something at best (when you just passed each other on one side of the earth, and you will collide as your orbits cross on the other side), although you can't really detect it until it's within line of sight, which brings it down to much less, maybe like 20 minutes. Radar or other detection systems also take a huge amount of mass and power to operate, which increases the cost. If your orbits go the same way, you do have some more time, and maybe multiple orbits to see that something is getting closer every pass, but then again, you can't really rely on that.
I've never been good at orbital mechanics, but I'm not sure how increasing the drag would allow you to get to a higher orbit (higher meaning altitude above earth). Reducing drag just makes you slow down slower, but I don't think will let you go to a higher orbit. The height of the orbit is related to how fast you are going (for example, a geosync orbit is 3.07 km/s, whereas LEO is 1.3–1.8 km/s). Drag will never make you go faster. I think you would get a more elliptical orbit, which would also add more atmospheric drag at your new lower perigee, also decreasing the lifetime. Even a low lifetime orbit for a cubesat could easily be 10 years, and if you lose communications with it and lose track of where it is at, it could be a hazard.
The amount you'd have to change the orbit also depends on the confidence of detection of the object you're trying to avoid (ie, how close you want to risk getting to it). If you're less sure where it is, you need to get further away from it in order to make sure you avoid it.
To sum up, you don't know when you need to do something, your ability to do something may be limited based on the craft doing the avoiding, and you may not have a lot of time to figure out you need to do something and then do it.
Why these things are regulated is because orbits around earth are basically a shared resource. How it works is very complicated. I used to work in the space industry, and I don't even pretend to be an expert.
Space debris is a massive problem that is only getting worse. [1]
These objects aren't just floating up there, they're travelling at tens of thousands of miles per hour. If they can't be tracked, they can't be avoided.
There's a lot more nuance here and that video is misleading in several ways.
Starting with the weakest reason first, but one that's also very important. Space is really big. There are some 6 figures of tiny things in space and thousands of larger things. This sounds pretty scary. But now imagine that we put 6 figures of tiny things, and some thousands of large things in random places in the US and set them on a random path. You can intuit that the odds of any collision are going to be extremely low. And now imagine the entirety of LEO. It is magnitudes larger than the USA of course.
The next is that objects tend to be going in the same direction. Rockets take advantage of Earth's rotation to get a 'head start' on their launch which means that most things end up going in the same orbital direction. Two things going the same speed with the same orbital characteristics will never collide. With different orbital characteristics, they will get two chances for collision per orbit with an extremely low chance of it occurring by chance.
And maybe the biggest point is another really cool and counter intuitive part of space. When we think of the USA we obviously just think of the ground. But of course there is a vertical axis in space. And the awesome thing here is what determines your altitude in space. It's entirely based on your velocity (well and the mass of whatever you're orbiting). In other words, objects cannot collide unless they're traveling at the same rate of speed. Pretty neat!
Another issue is that even at LEO, objects do experience some atmospheric drag. Any object in LEO that is not occasionally correcting its orbit (accelerating) will eventually come back down to Earth. This includes all of that tiny debris.
So now make the US absurdly vastly larger. And create multiple layers of the USA where any given car traveling at any given speed goes on a specific layer. And set them [almost] all in the same direction. And finally remove small stuff (or 'decommissioned' cars) over time. So sure, space debris is something to definitely keep in mind - but I think people don't really realize how relatively irrelevant this is. Another thing is that even if we did experience some catastrophic kessler syndrome level event it would mostly have no impact on things going through LEO (and not orbiting within it) simply because the massiveness of space just means the odds of an impact are so very low. So it would not kill space travel as the video states.
And lastly, necessity is the mother of all invention. There are an enormous number of viable ideas for removing debris from space. But there hasn't been that much of a push for them simply because it's not really necessary yet. If we reach a point when it becomes necessary, there are solutions.
Not true. Satellite orbits have all kinds of inclinations, including polar and retrograde. Just because you watched the Space Shuttle on TV getting launched into a typical prograde orbit doesn't mean all orbiting objects do that.
> what determines your altitude in space. It's entirely based on your velocity (well and the mass of whatever you're orbiting).
You are greatly oversimplifying orbital mechanics. Satellite orbits are not perfectly circular, and they have more than one degree of freedom.
> Objects that have a reasonable chance of colliding do go in the same direction.
No, even that's not the case. If it were, the delta v of anticipated collisions would be low enough that they wouldn't pose a serious problem.
The Wikipedia article on the Kessler syndrome, linked to upthread, gives some useful references. One of them is an article on how a cupola window on the ISS was pitted by a microscopic piece of space debris. The pit is 7 mm across, about the size of what a small rock would put in a car windshield at highway speed. How fast would an object about 1000 times smaller (and therefore about a billion times less massive) have to be traveling to have the same impact energy? (Hint: it's about the same as LEO orbital speed--but that's orbital speed relative to the ground, not relative to objects on nearby orbits in the same direction.)
> Starting with the weakest reason first, but one that's also very important. Space is really big.
Geostationary orbit is approximately 22,200 miles above the surface. At that height, the usable sphere for a satellite is 8,630,000,000 square miles. Certainly a huge deal of that isn't overly usable (polar, etc.), but nonetheless.
The problem with your intuition is that you have to consider those objects travelling about the USA at 10km/s - ie, they can cross the entire country in 7 minutes.
At the time of writing, SOCRATES shows seven approaches closer than 100 metres in the next few days:
> If you've tracked it once, you know its location for many months to come
Not in low-earth orbit. Look at this graph of the ISS's altitude over time [1]. Atmospheric drag makes orbital dynamics too complicated for long-term predictions. Add in station-keeping [2] jitter, and one has a necessity for reliable tracking.
It often takes decades. There is still debris from the 1960s in LEO, which has a lot. Five satellite collisions have complicated things. I suggest this Wikipedia article:
"Below 2,000 km (1,200 mi) Earth-altitude, debris are denser than meteoroids; most are dust from solid rocket motors, surface erosion debris like paint flakes, and frozen coolant from RORSAT nuclear-powered satellites."
As the article explains its debris below 2,000 km. Such as "DMSP-F13, launched in 1995—exploded while in a sun-synchronous polar orbit leaving a debris field of at least 43 to 100 large fragments and more than 50,000 pieces smaller than 1 millimeter" which is about 450 nautical miles.
The ISS's changes like that though because it's constantly doing burns to keep it "afloat" an abandoned satellite in LEO is going to eventually just burn up in the atmosphere and have a much more consistent orbit. And if it's not abandoned, then there should be _someone_ keeping tabs on where it's otherwise what's the point of it being up there?
> The ISS's changes like that though because it's constantly doing burns to keep it "afloat" an abandoned satellite in LEO is going to eventually just burn up in the atmosphere and have a much more consistent orbit.
This is not accurate. Even if you ignore the big vertical jumps at each burn, the downward trend is very obviously irregular. Satellites in LEO experience a slight drag force from the Earth's outer atmosphere, and the magnitude of this force can vary unpredictably by orders of magnitude depending on space weather conditions.
Satellites in orbit are moving very quickly, so a slight change in altitude (i.e. orbital period) results in a very large change in position at any given future time. More importantly, the inaccuracies are compounded with each subsequent orbit. As a rough estimate, an uncertainty of 1m in the height of a satellite in LEO translates to a positional error of more than 100m/day. It is not possible to accurately predict the position of a satellite without ongoing observations.
Just what we need - more heavy metals polluting our air, forming oxides with members of the Actinide and Lanthanide groups from their vaporized processors.
Maybe this is something which cheaper space-launch could solve. If it were economical to send maintenance robots to fix dead satellites, then perhaps these tiny satellites could be allowed to self-track (using GPS). In the event that the satellite fails it could be repaired / collected / de-orbited before its orbit deviates too far from nominal.
For what it's worth, GPS does work, and can indeed work very well. Applications like GNSS-RO have been done on research and commercial LEO satellites and use GPS to get orbit position estimates down to 10s of centimeters.
You can get GPS in LEO, but there are altitude and speed limits on non-military applications / chips.
"In GPS technology, the term "COCOM Limits" also refers to a limit placed on GPS tracking devices that disables tracking when the device calculates that it is moving faster than 1,000 knots (1,900 km/h; 1,200 mph) at an altitude higher than 18,000 m (59,000 ft).[2] This was intended to prevent the use of GPS in intercontinental ballistic missile-like applications.
Some manufacturers apply this limit only when both speed and altitude limits are reached, while other manufacturers disable tracking when either limit is reached. In the latter case, this causes some devices to refuse to operate in very high altitude balloons.[3]"
As a naive bystander, can you please explain why it would be bad to "pollute" space? Do things fall back into the atmosphere and burn up and sprinkle ash back onto the earth? I thought that objects once past the gravitational pull of the earth will just continue to drift away into the nothingness of space, and no matter the volume, it would be an insignificant amount to cause any harm to our planet or view of the stars.
> can you please explain why it would be bad to "pollute" space? Do things fall back into the atmosphere and burn up and sprinkle ash back onto the earth?
The risk of space junk falling on people is tiny. The chief concern is around collisions in orbit. Worst case: "collisions between objects could cause a cascade where each collision generates space debris that increases the likelihood of further collisions," which could create a "distribution of debris in orbit [that] could render space activities and the use of satellites in specific orbital ranges unfeasible for many generations" [1].
These regulations are about protecting affordable access to space, by managing the risk of collisions.
(Eventually, yes, most things will fall down or burn up or drift away. But that process can take years if not millennia.)
Things don't really leave the gravitational pull of the earth -- it's still on the order of 9m/s^2 in low earth orbit. In order for things to stay up, they've got to be moving around 9 km/s sideways -- essentially constantly falling towards earth, but going fast enough sideways to miss.
The issue is that at those speeds, anything bigger than a fleck of paint hitting anything else will turn both things into a bunch of tiny chunks. See [1] for an example of two satellites colliding.
The big fear is that if you get enough stuff up there, even if you control most of it, one collision would be enough to trigger a chain reaction. [2]
Where do you think the "gravitational pull of the earth" ends? Hint: the moon is inside the gravitational pull of the earth... The danger is that things in orbit have velocity. A lot of velocity. Taking that nice F=mv^2 equation in mind you can imagine what would happen if a piece of space junk were to hit something we care about (or hit something we don't care about and create a lot more little pieces of junk that are now spreading out to cause more mayhem.) Space is big, and earth orbit is also a very big place, but there is still a lot of junk whizzing around up there and increasing the odds that something you forgot about will hit something you care about is counter-productive.
I wonder as well what is the zone he’s talking about, but he talked about the zone in 9m/s2, not F=mv^2. I guess the first one extends up to 100km altitude, where I think geostationary satellites are, and indeed is very closeby.
One of my favorite "slice of life" anime series out there is PlanetES[1]
It does a great job of illustrating the potential impact of this on humanity in the not too distant future, and some of the jobs it creates (space trash collectors).
I’am positive someone expressed that exact sentiment about the ocean at some point. I had a Botany professor who always used to say “there is no such place as away”.
The concern, as expressed by the FCC, is that the satellites are so small they are hard for U.S. Space Command to track them. Which means we could approve a rocket launch where one of these rapid little beasties knocks out a window or causes other catastrophic damage because we didn't know where it was precisely.
And you could argue it's too small to do damage (not true) or to low to be a real concern (maybe true), but the precedent is dangerous to allow.
The great thing about small satellites is that they are light and cheap and easy to launch. However, once they get to space, they take up just as much room as everything else: one orbit. Space isn’t a parking lot where you can park the smaller things closer together, and not being able to track the small satellites just makes that problem worse.
preventive measures are nice but pointless. we should develop technology such that whatever is floating above cant interfere with the object we put up regardless of it getting hit.
More stuff going into space is going to be an inevitability and the US won't be able to stop other countries space programs from doing and launching what we dont like.
No, it's much much worse [1]. Startups need to start following regulations. This "move fast and break things" mentality when it comes to our environment is irresponsible and childish.
>the distribution of debris in orbit could render space activities and the use of satellites in specific orbital ranges unfeasible for many generations.
Is worse than the collapse of the entire ecosystem.
You're the one who introduced "collapse of the entire ecosystem," nobody that you've replied mentioned it.
We would lose a lot if denied access to orbit. For example, satellite communications, intel satellites would be gone, as well as weather satellites. Imagine the impact that would have on weather models and forecasting, and by extension farm productivity. Google Maps and the like would rapidly become out of date, and satellite phones would no longer work.
It'd be a disaster and while I'm sure we'd find ways to mitigate many aspects of it, there would still be a serious impact on our entire civilization.
You are correct that I introduced the collapse of the entire ecosystem. That's what garbage in the ocean does. Which is why it is fundamentally different than garbage in space. Because garbage in space is not going to make life on planet earth unsuitable any time soon. Which is also why it is not "much much worse" to have garbage in space than in the ocean.
Keep downvoting me though because that's how people handle being disagreed with buried in replies that no rational people are reading.
This is incredibly reckless of the company. Objects this small present a danger to human flight in space because we can't track them with Radar. I hope they are fined into the ground and I hope no one is injured as a result of their intentionally brash actions.
Lots of great thoughts / comments. I'm stuck trying to figure out how no one at Swarm knew (or cared?) about the size requirement. It's seems like it should be obvious / common knowledge.
IANAL but my TLDR is Swarm applied for US licencing to launch, got told no, because there devices are too small for some ground based tracking systems, but launched anyways because they already had bought space on an Indian launch and they didn't have time to move ownership to a better regulatory body. On the plus side it's time to look at who owns the support & development contract for the air-forces satellite radar, probably LockMart, because they will probably get a contract to improve to a 5cm or less resolution.
Regulating launches is a losing battle. If someone wants to put something into space, they'll just go to a country without regulations. And for cases like this where a US company does it, the company will just move elsewhere, or have a subsidiary or contractor "own" the satellite.
I don't see how the FCC even has jurisdiction over this. I guess they have jurisdiction over communications with satellites within the US, but not over the satellites themselves. And practically speaking, they have no enforcement capabilities in this realm.
Setting aside the dubious wisdom of entrusting your launch payload to North Korea, it would be against several laws for a US company to do that - even through proxies and subsidiaries.
Or human rights, or nuclear non-proliferation, or treaties against using chemical weapons, or... I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. Amoral autocrats ruling medieval slave states will keep doing what they do. Should Swarm relocate from SV to NK?
My point is that GP claimed no country would violate international law, when quite frankly that's not true. Hell, even India may have by launching Swarm's satellites without approval from Swarm's host country.
They apparently took a bundle of stuff from Spaceflight Industries, including the space junk from Swarm, and launched it without paying much attention to what it actually was. That seems to be no worse than inattention and maybe a bit of incompetence.
> they'll just go to a country without regulations
There may be some amount of regulatory tourism, but I don't think any countries for some time will be havens. All the countries with a commercial spaceflight industry have a vested interest in not creating a debris cascade.
2. What's a better alternative? Shooting stuff out of LEO with lasers...?
> the company will just move elsewhere, or have a subsidiary or contractor "own" the satellite.
So what? Those things are only magic check-mate cards if the government lets them be. And... why the hell should any government let them be?
> And practically speaking, they have no enforcement capabilities in this realm.
We can't bring people back to life, but that doesn't mean that a country can't punish people for murder the moment they step foot inside that country's borders.
> I don't see how the FCC even has jurisdiction over this. I guess they have jurisdiction over communications with satellites within the US, but not over the satellites themselves. And practically speaking, they have no enforcement capabilities in this realm.
They have jurisdiction because they have historically had jurisdiction. If not the FCC, then some other agency would do it.
And methinks you underestimate the enforcement capability of any US government agency. They can simply ban people, companies or countries from doing business with the US government. For something like an aerospace business, no US government business means bankruptcy.
And that's just to start. This can escalate into things like export restrictions, restricted countries, or munitions export controls. And once it's in the realm of munitions, the guys with guns can show up.
The Outer Space Treaty sets the rules for (this) space. All countries with launch capabilities (and many others) are signatories. Each country administers the rules by delegating to some agency. This happens to be the FCC in the case of the US.
Why does reading this sound like a prequel to 1984? I wonder how the first pioneers of aircraft would have ever gotten off the ground had they lived in a similar stringent ‘regulatory environment’
> I wonder how the first pioneers of aircraft would have ever gotten off the ground had they lived in a similar stringent ‘regulatory environment’
You realize that satellites are not a new technology, right? There are literally thousands of them up there. Sputnik was launched in 1957.
Let's compare to mandatory pilots licensing. The first flights were in 1903 or so. Air traffic was regulated in various ways at the federal level by the 1920s. So about 20 years from first flight to regulation.
It has been over 60 years since the first satellite launch.
Also, airplanes have a distinct advantage: they are easier to track and always come down within a few minutes of breaking down. If anything, satellites should be more regulated.
The idea that putting satellites in LEO is some sort of brand new never-before-done thing that deserves wide latitude for greenfield engineering is crazy. Hell, I've owned a GPS receiver for about 20 years! Space is a frontier. LEO, however, has been a crowded commons for at least a decade or two.
> Why does reading this sound like a prequel to 1984?
Who knows, but this seems common enough that it deserved a name. I propose "1984 disease" as a new colloquialism for the act of comparing reasonable regulation to dystopian authoritarianism.
> The idea that putting satellites in LEO is some sort of brand new never-before-done thing that deserves wide latitude for greenfield engineering is crazy. Hell, I've owned a GPS receiver for about 20 years!
GPS (along with the other major navigation satellite constellations) are in Medium Earth Orbit.
LEO is about to become a lot more crowded, thanks to cheaper launch costs and miniaturisation. What was previously done with MEO and GEO satellites can now be done with LEO constellations, with the advantages of being closer to earth.
Some proposed constellations in LEO number in the thousands of satellites, which is unprecedented:
Nowadays it may seem obvious that aircraft are not trespassing when they are flying over us, but it was not obvious at the time. A future regulatory regime for satellites could also conceivably see it as obvious that satellite design shouldn't be limited by the ability for them to be tracked by a common tracking system, but rather have a goal to avoid collisions through other means.
> A future regulatory regime for satellites could also conceivably see it as obvious that satellite design shouldn't be limited by the ability for them to be tracked by a common tracking system, but rather have a goal to avoid collisions through other means
This would require quantum leaps in our propulsion and energy storage capabilities. A plane changing course and a satellite changing plane take vastly different energies. Small satellites which can manage plane changes are many, many breakthroughs away.
I did not mean maneuvering, I meant other means of keeping track of where satellites are. A tracking system doesn't actually move the satellites either. In theory this could involve transponder requirements or orbital constraints.
All I'm saying is that there is more than one way to skin a cat, and when regulations say "you must skin a cat in this way", that can lead to technical stagnation.
> when regulations say "you must skin a cat in this way", that can lead to technical stagnation
The regulations are broad. They basically say "there must be a way to track your satellite." Transponder-based tracking doesn't work for small satellites because of the power demands. Passive approaches are preferred. I've seen small satellite designers adapt the shape and materials of their birds, to maximize reflectivity. Swarm didn't do any of this.
He didn’t say “air traffic regulation”, he said regulatory environment. Barriers today would range from safety regulation to disturbing endangered gnat breeding to neighborly noise complaints.
Check out Glenn Martin in ‘To raise heaven ans Earth’. The amount of freedom these inventors needed and took advantage of would be much harder to achieve today. That’s exactly the point - they were able to test, build, fly, improve their ‘dangerous experiments’ without local, state or Federal government stepping in.
Thinking that the government shouldn't step in so that businesses can experiment with whatever they want is an interesting viewpoint when the regulation your pointing out as bad is one to keep this business from hurting others.
When the Wright brothers tested their plane they only put their own bodies at risk. When swarm is throwing up satellites too small to track they are threatening every other satellite and space station in orbit.
Should chemical companies be allowed to ditch their experiments into the local river because it let's them iterate faster? If the answer to that is no, then why should swarm be allowed to throw anything they want into a position to damage other orbital craft?
I get your point I truly do. But a nefarious state (fascist, communist, dictatorial) will always use ‘safety’, ‘security’ as a concern and an argument to block and jail.
> But a nefarious state (fascist, communist, dictatorial) will always use ‘safety’, ‘security’ as a concern and an argument to block and jail.
So what? Are there not valid reasons to bring up "safety" and "security"?
Unless you're claiming we're dealing with a "nefarious state", this statement doesn't carry any weight. For that matter even nefarious states may have valid safety concerns, including preventing orbital debris.
What is "a society". Who makes those rules? How far away from the will of the sovereign is the latest ABC..XYZ agency? Who oversees the regulators and law enforcement in a transparent way? Can/should one country's official dictate what other countries do or who they launch into space?
In this case, India said they'd do the launch only if the US agreed. All nations care about orbital debris, and in India's case, the only way they get warnings about potential collisions is because the US makes collision warnings from US radar data available to everyone for free. So they've got 2 reasons to have that rule.
I'm inclined to agree with those who think the FCC is overstepping it's boundaries, although I understand the logic of those who explain why they're not overstepping their boundaries.
To me it seems to be a question of capability. America in this situation sounds like a skrawny lifeguard yelling at big burly surfer dudes to stay out of the deep end. We want the authority to regulate across borders and to maintain our margin of superiority, but do we have that ability? If we don't have the ability to lead this industry, we shouldn't be granted the authority to regulate it either. At least not globally from within a vacuum.
If America wants to regulate what other countries put into space, maybe we should have enough of a presence in space to be an authority figure.
I haven't seen the U.S. government put a fair proportion of their effort into space technology in decades, yet we still expect to be the global harbinger of regulation. If a private company can make a 5cm X 5cm X 5cm satellite and we can't track it maybe the responsibility should be on us to improve our tracking abilities rather than sangbaggging everyone else to support our faux superiority.
> We want the authority to regulate across borders
A U.S. regulator regulating an American satellite, made in America by American engineers working for an American company, whose orbital damages are the liability of the American taxpayer, is being too internationally ambitious?
> I haven't seen the U.S. government put a fair proportion of their effort into space technology in decades
We're the largest backers of the ISS, have the largest civil and military launch industries, have the largest concentration of private launch and satellite companies and are one of a handful of countries in the world with a civil space agency.
Literally yesterday, a reusable American rocket (the only of its kind on the planet) put a NASA exoplanet survey satellite into orbit [1].
> We're the largest backers of the ISS, have the largest civil and military launch industries, have the largest concentration of private launch and satellite companies and are one of a handful of countries in the world with a civil space agency.
And while we're #1 in overall spending we're second to Russia in terms of percentage of GDP. Considering our military budget is more than the next 10x countries combined and considering we pay into that budget regardless of our GDP I'd say we're putting in minimal effort. You're also giving credit to the US government for research, engineering, and labor that was done by private industry. That's where this problem becomes a problem.
Our government can't keep up with private innovation. We've got a car company who can make a car that gets 120 MPG but the DOT won't let it through the red tape because their required emissions testing equipment isn't sensitive enough to read it's emissions. So you deny the car and tell the company to come back with a shittier one they can read.
So instead of letting innovation happen, we're going to stifle it because we, ourselves, don't want to do our part to regulate it properly and in a timely fashion.
> A U.S. regulator regulating an American satellite, made in America by American engineers working for an American company, whose orbital damages are the liability of the American taxpayer, is being too internationally ambitious?
So when your private sector tech outpaces your public sector's ability to regulate it you just disallow advanced technology and keep regulating the same way you've always done? That sounds exceedingly bureaucratic.
> Our government can't keep up with private innovation. We've got a car company who can make a car that gets 120 MPG but the DOT won't let it through the red tape because their required emissions testing equipment isn't sensitive enough to read it's emissions. So you deny the car and tell the company to come back with a shittier one they can read.
...This is disproven by the mere existence of electric cars.
> So when your private sector tech outpaces your public sector's ability to regulate it you just disallow advanced technology and keep regulating the same way you've always done? That sounds exceedingly bureaucratic.
Or maybe the new tech just isn't very good because it doesn't take society into account. Others are innovating rapidly and don't run into the same issues. Because they listen to, learn from, cooperate with, and propose new rules to the regulating bodies that govern them.
Seriously -- what power does the FCC hope to exert at this point? We live in a world where launchers exist in other countries ...