Four Swarm Satellites In Space Were Not Authorized by FCC
FCC Accuses Stealthy Startup of Launching Rogue Satellites, IEEE Spectrum
“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.”
Is the FCC the only official to authorize satellites? Or can Swarm just go to another agency in another country for “permission?”
Probably if they have an ITAR permit from the State Department to transfer ownership. See why the NSC wants to rationalize and centralize licensing, including ITAR, in a single office in the Department of Commerce?
Did you actually write “rationalize… ITAR”? That’s probably one of those things which can’t be fixed. It might be easier to scrap it entirely and rebuild it from the ground up.
They should get licenses, the article linked has the details needed. The good news is that they are in 500 km (approx) orbits, well below the 700 km bottom of the altitude that is very crowded. And with a low orbit like that they will be in orbit for only a year or so. The ISS is at about 400 km and has to raise it’s orbit routinely, the BEE satellites should not be dense and so will decay faster than a more dense satellite would.
Even faster than that. What matters is mass per cross-section area. That’s proportional to linear size.
…and they get an extra tug every time they cross the equator and have no station keeping. But doesn’t that mean that at some point they could go elliptical and be passing in and out of lower orbital distances like where the ISS is at?
Bill – it doesn’t work like that. There is no tug at the Equator and they will not develop any eccentricity. There is just no mechanism for that to happen.
Not quite correct. There is a tug *from* the equatorial bulge, but that tug is “sideways” to the momentum vector of the orbit. The result is not to increase the eccentricity of a satellite in LEO, but to cause the orbital plane to precess.
Jeff – this forum is restrictive for a discussion of orbital mechanics. My comment was about the lifetime of the satellite, Bill’s implied that the Equatorial bulge would affect satellite lifetime. The effect is mostly on the orbit at max distance from the Equator of course, not when it crosses the Equator. Ref: Bate, Mueller, and White page 156 among others.
Who made it ‘ restrictive”? Not me.
Not in a sense like you restrict conversation – but when I have taken orbital mechanics classes we have black boards, we draw diagrams, we can get into the math as deeply as we need to. What is a “tug” at the Equator? We don’t have time to explain the specific angular momentum here – the acceleration due to the oblateness of the Earth is not really sideways. It does torque that vector. A real answer to Bill’s comment would take a while to transmit.
Glad there is wiki for us non orbital mechanics class takers .. smiles
https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…
I don’t see anything happening to the eccentricity. In any case, atmospheric damps eccentricity very quickly. But the altitude will gradually decrease, and these spacecraft will pass through the altitude of ISS. That hardly makes them unique, but apparently the FCC was concerned with the small (28 to 100 cm^2) cross-section and how hard they would be to track.
OK, I’m missing an important detail. How is it that a U.S. gov. agency has authority over a payload launched from India soil?
The licensing is from the country of the “owner” of the spacecraft, so Swarm needed a license from the US authorities. Since it’s commercial, that’s the FCC in the US. If it were government, it would be the NTIA.
The satellites were built, and are owned and operated by a US company. I’m wondering why the Federal Communications Commission has jurisdiction over potential orbital debris issues. I would have thought that was up to the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation.
However, the OST starts with launch nations having jurisdiction, then flag nations. Swarm was presumably going to transfer the flag-of-registry back to the US until their application was refused, so they’ve either switched it to another country like Luxembourg or left it with India as launch nation.
IMO, unless they’ve formally registered their satellites as US flagged, then it’s no concern of the FCC’s.
If they were built in the US there should be a permit from ITAR that caught this.
It’s probably similar to how the FCC has jurisdiction over the lighting and painting of radio antennas. Even though the requirements are set by the FAA, the FCC enforces the proper installation and maintenance of the lighting. The FCC even makes determinations on whether a particular installation affects the safety of aircraft;
§17.21 (b) The Commission may modify the above requirement for painting and/or lighting of antenna structures, when it is shown by the applicant that the absence of such marking would not impair the safety of air navigation, or that a lesser marking requirement would insure the safety thereof.
Ya, I noticed that part as well, that’s why I generalized the wording of the question to “U.S. Govt. Agency”. My understanding (false, apparently) has always been that responsibility lies flat on the launching country. I didn’t know that the “flag” could be, and routinely is, with the country of residence of the payload’s owner. Which actually makes a lot more sense than “you launched it, you’re responsible for it”.
That is exactly why the last meeting of the National Space Council focused on streamlining regulations and placing everything except launch/landing/recovery under the Dept. of Commerce. It’s too easy with the current licensing for these things to fall between the cracks, especially with the new generation of smallsats. Hopefully Congress will follow their recommendations and make it so.
I’m going to regret asking this, but… As far as I know, the FCC’s authority doesn’t extend to flashing lights (regardless of the application.) So if I built a spacecraft which used optical communications exclusively, presumably I wouldn’t need a license from the FCC. In that case, who checks to make sure it isn’t a debris risk?
Depends where you launch it from. But if you launch from the U.S. you need to get a license from the FAA CST. If you launch from a foreign nation that you need an ITAR permit from the State Department to export it.
So I launch a satellite which does not broadcast at radio frequencies (from the US, let’s not get into ITAR just yet), I need FAA approval to make sure I’m not recklessly producing orbital debris. If it does broadcast at radio frequencies, I need FCC approval to make sure debris isn’t a problem? Or do I need both the FAA and the FCC to sign off on the same issue? (If so, what happens if they disagree?) That sounds every bit as disfunctional as your earlier comment suggested.
In terms of ITAR and foreign launches (and now I know I’ll regret this), what happens after a secondary payload is delivered? It’s quite possible the secondary payload would have to be delivered before all the FAA and/or FCC approvals were issued. At some point in their preparations for launch, it would become impractical for them to remove the secondary payload (doing so would delay or impact the launch of the primary payload.) So what if a company delivers, doesn’t get the necessary US licenses and the foreign launch provider says, “too bad, it’s too late to take it off, so it’s getting launched anyway.”
The FCC takes care of the orbital debris, since *most* spacecraft have some sort of radio on them, it makes sense in the “small-sat” world to have a sort of “one stop shop”
A single licensing agency makes sense, but ideally it would be one with competence in all (or at least most) of the issues involved. All spacecraft fly, at least at some point, so the FAA might be a better choice. That might even make more sense than the Department of Commerce: If someone might build a communications satellite for the Department of Defense and another, identical one for a private operator, they’d see the same approval procedures from the FAA.
The (default official world) satellite catalog at Space-Track.org has them as “US” satellites and I think they get that from the organization that built the satellite (when possible).
The FCC isn’t ‘responsible’ for ‘regulating commercial satellites’ — they simply take the position that you need a license from them to use the radio spectrum, and that since they can deny the license at their whim, they can add any additional requirements to the licensee which they think might be a good idea. I have searched in vain, and asked FCC officials, for what act of Congress grants them this claimed authority, without success.
While true that this may seem like a bit of an overreach by the FCC, it’s still not a good idea to tick off a regulatory government agency when you’re a tiny start-up and likely don’t have the deep pockets to hire a lawyer who specializes in “working with” said government regulators.
That’s exactly how they regulate my amateur radio antennas.