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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: 5, Informative) by tonyPick on Monday March 12 2018, @06:57AM

    by tonyPick (1237) on Monday March 12 2018, @06:57AM (#651228) Homepage Journal

    have now decided that their authority extends internationally to regulating satellite launches in foreign countries.

    It's an American company - under the Outer Space Treaty the US Government is responsible for US companies that launch satellites (and US taxpayers get to foot the bill to fix things in the event of US company screw ups), and the FCC is the body that gets involved because the sats want to talk to the ground and that's something the FCC has to get involved in anyway since they get to say what goes on there.

    The details get complicated (The ITU get involved for some things, and there's a bunch of international agreements, and an open question about this being something a centralised body should regulate AIUI), but the idea the FCC get involved here is not some arbitrary overreach that Ajit Pai decided he wanted the FCC to get involved in: https://www.fcc.gov/general/international-bureau-satellite-division [fcc.gov]

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