Comments on: FCC fines company $900K for unapproved satellite launch

By: wayne

wayne — Sat, 22 Dec 2018 14:42:21 +0000

Wickard v. Filburn: The Aggregation Principle & Congressional Power
The Federalist Society
August, 2018
https://youtu.be/rS4NRHU23cE
4:39

By: wayne

wayne — Sat, 22 Dec 2018 14:40:18 +0000

These alphabet agencies, need to be eliminated, by any means necessary.

Wheat, Weed, and ObamaCare:
How the Commerce Clause Made Congress All-Powerful
https://youtu.be/6SDf5_Thqsk
10:05

By: Edward

Edward — Sat, 22 Dec 2018 01:49:18 +0000

From the article: “The agency found that not only had Swarm launched without a license, but it had also illegally used ground communication stations in Georgia to communicate with the satellites for over a week while the spacecraft were in orbit. Plus, the company had done some unlawful tests with weather balloons and other equipment before the launch. The FCC is responsible for authorizing all of these procedures, but hadn’t approved Swarm to do them.”

It looks to me like the company was violating laws and procedures just so it could do whatever it wanted whenever it wanted without coordinating with anyone else who might be adversely affected. As Joe has pointed out, the fallout is considerable. In breaking laws and procedures in order to try to bypass the bureaucracy, they merely brought more bureaucracy to the law-abiding companies and citizens.

Joe,
Admiral Grace Hopper is often misquoted. She said, “if it is a good idea, go ahead and do it. It is much easier to apologize than it is to get permission.” None of the violations that Swarm did were good ideas. The reflective surface that they used on their undersized satellites may be a good idea, but has it been sufficiently tested as a working solution to the size problem? If so, why could they not convince anyone before launch? If it had not been sufficiently tested, launching it wasn’t a good idea at all.

By: Col Beausabre

Col Beausabre — Sat, 22 Dec 2018 01:46:14 +0000

To me this nonsensical and it illustrates the confusion that seems to exist within the US government regarding commercial space. Why is the FCC regulating launches and not the FAA ? Everything else from ultra-lights, hand launched drones and model rockets to the largest airliners and high performance aircraft are its mission, so why not launches and orbits? Have the FCC approve the frequencies and signal strengths used, but leave the rest of it to the agency that since the days of the Civil Aeronautics Board has been regulating flight.

By: Joe

Joe — Fri, 21 Dec 2018 21:09:27 +0000

More importantly, this little fiasco has harmed a lot of small sat developers such as myself. I now have more paperwork and more questioning on everything I do. Sometimes the ask forgiveness instead of permission does a lot more harm than people realize.

Despite the new troubles, I will soldier on and get my PocketQube launched.