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California Startup Accused of Launching Unauthorized Satellites Into Orbit: Report
George Dvorsky, Gizmodo



~ An ISRO Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle lifting off from a launch pad at the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, India. Photo: ISRO

The US Federal Communications Commission says Swarm Technologies—a communications startup run by Silicon Valley expats—launched four tiny internet satellites into space back in January. That’s a problem because the FCC never greenlighted the project, saying the experimental satellites are dangerous. If confirmed, it would mark the first known time in history that unauthorized satellites have been placed in space....

....The four SpaceBees currently in orbit represent the first of what the company hopes will be a larger constellation of tiny satellites, which together will be capable of delivering low cost internet to virtually any part of the globe.

“The only problem is, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) had dismissed Swarm’s application for its experimental satellites a month earlier, on safety grounds,” writes Harris at Spectrum. “It feared that the four SpaceBees now orbiting the Earth would pose an unacceptable collision risk for other spacecraft. If confirmed, this would be the first ever unauthorized launch of commercial satellites.” The FCC regulates commercial satellites in the US, and under some interpretations of existing laws, it has purview over American-owed satellites launched from other countries.

What Swarm has done is actually quite upsetting. That unscrupulous startups are tossing unsanctioned—and potentially dangerous—objects into space is so not cool. And it appears the FCC agrees........

The satellites are considered unsafe because of their diminutive size. Each SpaceBee measures a mere 10 cm x 10 cm x 2.8 cm, which is about the size of a hardcover book, or one-quarter the size of a standard CubeSat. Georgia Institute of Technology satellite expert Marcus Holzinger told Spectrum that satellites of that size are difficult to track, so it’s virtually impossible to know if its trajectory will set it on a course towards another object in orbit. And at those speeds, an impact with another object would be catastrophic to both.

For full story:
https://gizmodo.com/california-startup-accused-of-launching-unauthorized-sa-1823657316


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