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Comment by riskable | Hacker News Reader

So if Swarm wasn't a US-based company they wouldn't have gotten this fine? They launched the satellites from India and tested them from Georgia (the state in the US or the country? The article isn't clear).

Seems to me that future companies that want to do this sort of testing just need to do it in other countries or from off-shore platforms. Then apply for your FCC license so you can charge US customers without having to worry about getting sanctioned (and losing your ability to process credit cards and bank in the US).

When I started reading the article and read about all these international launches my first thought was, "why does the FCC have a say in any of this?" Now I'm thinking, "perhaps we need a better international framework for this sort of thing."

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We do have an international framework, of sorts. It's that each country must regulate satellites launched by their companies. A US-based company must comply with US laws regarding satellite launches and get permission to launch them.

In this case, Swarm lied to the Indian government and said the US had approved it (which made sense as they are a US-based company), while trying to hide the existence of the satellites from the US Government. Frankly, I think a $900k fine is too small.

My first thought when I saw 900k was "Oh shit, now everybody will do it".

Yes 900k seems like for some companies that kind of fine would be worth it to get their stuff in space and even if you made it 5 times higher seems like you could account for all of that in your budget. I think a more severe penalty would be ground them from future launches for 6 months(or other number maybe 6 months is too short), and failure to do that would have them sanctioned from the US and it's allies. The article states they are hoping the negative exposure from this fine is enough to deter the company, it is not even about the money.

If I recall correctly, Swarm did have FCC approval, but had it rescinded later shortly before launch.

The international framework is that each country can authorise satellites by companies based there, this is regulated by the ITU. In the US, the FCC is the relevant regulator, other countries have their own regulators. In the UK it is Ofcom which unlike the FCC does not charge fees but it does require third party liability insurance which the FCC does not.

If Swarm had been based in India, it would have needed to seek authorisation there. Swarm requested FCC authorisation which was denied on the basis of collision safety.

They then received permission to launch a set of larger satellites with better radar visibility. Imagine the surprise of the FCC when they discovered that Swarm had lied to their launch provider (claiming that they had authorisation) and launched the original satellites anyway!

In the past this has never been an issue because satellites were so expensive that no-one in their right mind would try to launch one without authorisation. As a result, launch providers may not have been rigorous in actually checking the authorisations for their secondary payloads.

The whole model is still rooted in a world where only a few countries could launch satellites and only a small number of very large companies within them could afford to build and launch them. Within a cosy world like that, regulatory compliance is important but it is also assumed that everyone else is complying and actually checking that is rare. Certainly this case is going to change that.

Ah, so another "pre-legal" action by a company...

No... this is pretty explicitly illegal. It's not like they took advantage of a loophole, or exploited some vaguery of the law that wasn't yet nailed down. They flat out lied about the payload they were launching and whether they had received authorization.

Dubious would have been seeking approval from a non-US regulator. That's abusing the framework but technically I think there's no reason you couldn't get the CIO of Vanuatu (the relevant ITU administrator) to approve your satellite and have that be legal. The FCC would be mighty sour about that but I think you could do it.

This is just straight-up illegal.

US state.

Yes, the actual judgment document just vaguely refers to it as "Georgia" but it's inferred that it's the state since FCC has no statutory authority outside of the U.S. However in the application it's clearly marked as state of Georgia.

"Swarm seeks narrow authority to transmit data from the SpaceBEE satellites in order to access tracking information. The SpaceBEE satellites will only transmit to enable downlinking of GPS data, and will be muted at all other times. GPS data will be downlinked during passes over Los Altos, California and Buford, Georgia. These passes Swarm Technologies will occur approximately four times per day. Each transmission will require approximately two seconds."

[1] https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/FCC-18-184A1.pdf

[2] https://apps.fcc.gov/els/GetAtt.html?id=212398&x=.

Correct, of course. The FCC can’t control what an Indian company does, but this was clearly a US-based company launching out of India because US regulators said “no.”

I believe the Outer Space Treaty is the framework to handle the international part of all this, which India has ratified.

To answer your question, yes, the satellites were talked to from a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia.

They would, as long as they would have bought the least little screw and paid in USD (eg. thru Amazon).

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