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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: 2) by bradley13 on Monday March 12 2018, @08:10AM (15 children)

    by bradley13 (3053) on Monday March 12 2018, @08:10AM (#651239) Homepage Journal

    They really had two choices: (1) make their satellites larger; a 10cm cube is still pretty tiny, or (2) piss off the regulatory agency responsible for their company's entire future. So, naturally, they chose (2).

    As I understand it, the US tracks satellites for everyone, so pretty much everyone registers their planned launches with the US. This means that even moving abroad is unlikely to help: If the FCC says "no satellites from this untrustworthy company", then they can all go back to playing in mom's basement.

    --
    Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

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  • (Score: 2) by cubancigar11 on Monday March 12 2018, @08:37AM (12 children)

    by cubancigar11 (330) on Monday March 12 2018, @08:37AM (#651248) Homepage Journal

    What are the chances that this thing was on the collision course to a secret spy satellite and FCC simply lied that it is too small? *puts on tinfoil hat*

    • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday March 12 2018, @08:43AM (11 children)

      by maxwell demon (1608) on Monday March 12 2018, @08:43AM (#651253) Journal

      Pretty small, I'd say. Unless the satellites were intentionally set onto such an orbit, of course; but that would require a few more tin foil hats to believe.

      --
      The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
      • (Score: 3, Touché) by c0lo on Monday March 12 2018, @08:57AM (10 children)

        by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Monday March 12 2018, @08:57AM (#651258) Journal

        but that would require a few more tin foil hats to believe.

        That will be 10% more expensive but, on the flipside, it will be "American aluminum foil", not any kind of aluminium foil.

        --
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 12 2018, @11:54AM (9 children)

          by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 12 2018, @11:54AM (#651299)

          but that would require a few more tin foil hats to believe.

          That will be 10% more expensive but, on the flipside, it will be "American aluminum foil", not any kind of aluminium foil.

          I really want political commentary on commodity trade tariffs from someone who can't tell the difference between tin and aluminum.

          • (Score: 3, Interesting) by c0lo on Monday March 12 2018, @12:17PM (8 children)

            by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Monday March 12 2018, @12:17PM (#651304) Journal

            I'd suggest you to inform yourself before:
            - on the availability of the actual tinfoil [wikipedia.org]
            - the professionals always work with Al foiil [zapatopi.net] - thinking that tinfoil is better is a plot of the government to send you on an expensive wild goose chase after pure tin foil and ruin you financially in the process;
            - of course, the govt conspirators will have you believe that Al-foil hats are actually helping them steal your thoughts better [rationalwiki.org]. If you give course to their suggestion, you'll remain absolutely unprotected (well, except your guns, but the givt does worry too much about them).

            --
            https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
            • (Score: 2) by cubancigar11 on Monday March 12 2018, @12:44PM (7 children)

              by cubancigar11 (330) on Monday March 12 2018, @12:44PM (#651312) Homepage Journal

              Yes but if I were to wear an aluminum foil I would be such professional as to be part of a THINK TANK and instead of soylentnews I would be BOMBARDING my theories onto the REAL WORLD! :)

              • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday March 12 2018, @12:57PM (3 children)

                by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Monday March 12 2018, @12:57PM (#651315) Journal

                No think tank membership is complete without the MindGuard for Linux [zapatopi.net].
                Sure, projecting the mind is important, but so it is protecting it!

                --
                https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
                • (Score: 2) by cubancigar11 on Monday March 12 2018, @02:58PM (2 children)

                  by cubancigar11 (330) on Monday March 12 2018, @02:58PM (#651351) Homepage Journal

                  What is this? I already feel like I need to download it. May be port it to linux v> 3.0

                  • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday March 12 2018, @05:19PM (1 child)

                    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Monday March 12 2018, @05:19PM (#651432) Journal

                    It is much to late:

                    Combined with the computer industry's campaign of continuous obsolescence and the upgrade treadmill, this could render most consumer available personal computers unable to block psychotronics within five years! Lucky for us paranoids, Linux runs well on all-aluminum 486s, and Amiga computers remain as good as they were in 1990.

                    Newest version is v0.0.0.4

                            /mindguard/mindguard-0.0.0.4.tgz [2003-02-08]

                    If you didn't get in on the ground floor, you'll have to gut your computer to remove all the copper. That really cool Thermaltake all-copper heatsink? Uh-huh - it's part of the conspiracy.

                    • (Score: 2) by cubancigar11 on Monday March 12 2018, @06:46PM

                      by cubancigar11 (330) on Monday March 12 2018, @06:46PM (#651471) Homepage Journal

                      Hmm.... fortunately I have a system circa 1997 lying around somewhere. Let me see how to measure its copper content...

              • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 12 2018, @05:07PM (2 children)

                by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 12 2018, @05:07PM (#651427)

                The joke is on you, Cigarguy. There is no real world. You are in the Matrix.

                • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday March 12 2018, @06:44PM (1 child)

                  by maxwell demon (1608) on Monday March 12 2018, @06:44PM (#651470) Journal

                  But is it a real matrix?

                  --
                  The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
                  • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday March 12 2018, @07:45PM

                    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Monday March 12 2018, @07:45PM (#651489) Journal

                    Some guy, determined to leave town got to the edge of town, and the road ended. Let me find that . . .

                    https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0139809/ [imdb.com]

                    A computer scientist running a virtual reality simulation of 1937 becomes the primary suspect when his colleague and mentor is murdered.

                    At the end of the movie, you're left wondering how many levels there really are. Maybe the entire universe is just a simulation.

  • (Score: 3, Informative) by VLM on Monday March 12 2018, @01:37PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Monday March 12 2018, @01:37PM (#651321)

    3) Appeal the decision. Obvious the paper stamping reason has nothing to do with reality, the media seems to be going to great effort not to point out that 10 cm picosat is a class of cubesat satellites. Someone's pissed off at them and this is the manufactured hurdle. There are plenty of slightly larger cubesats at higher altitudes and some picosat launches that were not mysteriously legally blocked.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:CubeSats [wikipedia.org]

    4) Lower orbit (admittedly lower orbital lifetime). Fine, we'll dump 'em at a low altitude, you can radar zap them for testing purposes, they'll deorbit in a short amount of time. The PSLV-C40 dumped most of the satellites at a high orbit, then burned fuel to go to a lower orbit to dump these, probably for that reason; possibly doesn't have enough fuel to controllably go lower?

    If that brochure is correct, that's the launcher that also launched FOX-1D aka AO-92 a ham radio satellite of similar size and performance. Kinda odd FOX-1D (and of course FOX-1A it was mostly a clone of) were permitted but arbitrarily not this one. Someone didn't pay off the right someone.

  • (Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Monday March 12 2018, @06:01PM

    by ElizabethGreene (6748) Subscriber Badge on Monday March 12 2018, @06:01PM (#651449) Journal

    It feels like this is the right place to point out that dozens of 10cm^3 1U cubesats have been launched and are on orbit now and are tracked. The FCC rejected the request because this company's kit is 10cm x10cm x3cm, much thinner than a cubesat. There is every reason to believe the request would have been approved if it had been in a standard 1U cubesat form factor.

    In freedom units 10 x 10 x 3 cm is roughly 4 x 4 x 1 1/4 inches.