Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

Submission Preview

Link to Story

FCC Accuses Startup of Unauthorized Launch of Commercial Satellites

Accepted submission by takyon at 2018-03-10 22:58:10
Digital Liberty

A startup called Swarm Technologies has had its authorization for an upcoming satellite launch revoked [ieee.org] by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) after it flew four satellites on an Indian rocket [wikipedia.org] 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 [isro.gov.in]" 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 [fcc.gov] 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 [fcc.gov] 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 [wikipedia.org]. 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 [wikipedia.org].

Previously: India Launches 31 Satellites, Puts Cartosat-2 Into Orbit [soylentnews.org]


Original Submission