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posted by Fnord666 on Monday March 12 2018, @05:48AM   Printer-friendly
from the testing-anti-satellite-technology dept.

A startup called Swarm Technologies has had its authorization for an upcoming satellite launch revoked by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) after it flew four satellites on an Indian rocket without receiving authorization from the FCC:

On 12 January, a Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) rocket blasted off from India's eastern coast. While its primary cargo was a large Indian mapping satellite, dozens of secondary CubeSats from other countries travelled along with it. Seattle-based Planetary Resources supplied a spacecraft that will test prospecting tools for future asteroid miners, Canadian company Telesat launched a broadband communications satellite, and a British Earth-observation mission called Carbonite will capture high-definition video of the planet's surface.

Also on board were four small satellites that probably should not have been there. SpaceBee-1, 2, 3, and 4 were briefly described by the Indian space agency ISRO as "two-way satellite communications and data relay" devices from the United States. No operator was specified, and only ISRO publicly noted that they successfully reached orbit the same day.

[...] The only problem is, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) had dismissed Swarm's application for its experimental satellites a month earlier, on safety grounds. The FCC is responsible for regulating commercial satellites, including minimizing the chance of accidents in space. 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.

On Wednesday, the FCC sent Swarm a letter revoking its authorization for a follow-up mission with four more satellites, due to launch next month. A pending application for a large market trial of Swarm's system with two Fortune 100 companies could also be in jeopardy.

The concept uses satellites to send Internet of Things (IoT) device data to the Internet. Solar-powered gateways would collect data from nearby IoT devices, and beam it to a SpaceBEE satellite using VHF radio. The data would then be beamed down to Internet-connected ground stations.

The company was denied approval to launch 10 cm × 10 cm × 2.8 cm sized SpaceBEEs due to the craft being too small to reliably track using the United States Space Surveillance Network.

Previously: India Launches 31 Satellites, Puts Cartosat-2 Into Orbit


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 12 2018, @06:33AM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 12 2018, @06:33AM (#651224)

    Plenty of comets that size are coming down every day without the FCC stamp of approval. Just more junk on the pile as far as the cosmos or the globe are concerned.

  • (Score: 4, Informative) by c0lo on Monday March 12 2018, @08:12AM

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Monday March 12 2018, @08:12AM (#651242) Journal

    Plenty of comets that size are coming down every day without the FCC stamp of approval.

    And none of them stays in Earth's orbit even for a minute.

    --
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 12 2018, @02:21PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 12 2018, @02:21PM (#651339)

    The orbit around the Earth has been getting increasingly crowded over the last few decades and even more so when the Chinese blew up that satellite with their anti-satelllite weapon.

    Until we find some efficient way of cleaning up the orbit, there's going to be problems like this. Unfortunately, it can take quite some time for satellites to fall out of orbit if they aren't purposefully moved to do so.

    And as mentioned, those other things are only in our orbit for a short period of time, there's some risk of them hitting other objects while they're in our orbit, but the don't accumulate.

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by bob_super on Monday March 12 2018, @04:29PM

      by bob_super (1357) on Monday March 12 2018, @04:29PM (#651405)

      > even more so when the Chinese blew up that satellite with their anti-satelllite weapon

      Yes, those evil Chinese. Clearly the only one to create debris in space:
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-satellite_weapon [wikipedia.org]
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_West_Ford [wikipedia.org]

      Shall we also discuss the upcoming sat swarms including thousands of small sats from SpaceX and a few competitors?

      Just because some private US company decided not to file the right paperwork to launch 4 nanosats from India doesn't exactly make them the greatest threat to sats everywhere. It's a good thing that they don't get away with it, but let's not be overly dramatic