
FCC fines Swarm $900k for unauthorized smallsat launch (2018) - gballan
https://spacenews.com/fcc-fines-swarm-900000-for-unauthorized-smallsat-launch/
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mdorazio
I really wish cities and other regulatory bodies were equally as zealous in
their slapdowns of startup behavior. Airbnb, Uber, and the slew of scooter
companies come to mind as doing the equivalent of Swarm’s behavior in their
respective markets.

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strictusername
Hmm... Uber and AirBnB were 'first wave' where there wasn't even any
precedence to charge or regulate them. Now we see a ton of regulations in
specific cities for both of those companies.

As for the scooters, maybe you just live somewhere else, but where I am in, it
was a fucking NIMBY nightmare. They were throwing them in front of tech /
private transportation buses and into the water. They were all banned for
about 6 months until legislation came out.

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samcday
Kurzgesagt[1] convinced me that space debris will become a real problem if
we're not careful. A "Swarm" of fist-sized cubesats whizzing around our planet
at a few thousand km/h sounds like a nightmare.

[1]:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yS1ibDImAYU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yS1ibDImAYU)

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Wowfunhappy
Possibly stupid question, but I've been wondering about this for a while:

Could space debris also make ICBM launches infeasible? If so, I honestly
wonder whether the trade-off could be worthwhile.

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NikkiA
Probably not, ICBMs don't need to attain a full useful LEO, they only need to
stay in an orbital path for 1-2 orbits as current warhead delivery vehicles
are configured. That would allow them to use an orbital path lower than any
orbit that could be sustainable for debris.

Even if the current crop of ICBMs can't be configured to use such an orbit,
development of such wouldn't take more than a few months.

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sschueller
Not enogh, they willfully ignored the FCC. They should be bared from launching
anything in the future and the CEO should be fired.

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salawat
That won't do any good, sadly, which is the system working as designed.

The violation is associated with the company, which can disincorporate, sell
off all assets to a holding company, then reincorporate as a shiny new
corporation pure as driven snow.

Criminal charges can only be applied to specific individuals; and each of
those individuals you can bet are engineering their organizational structure
to provide plausible deniability.

Our justice system is ill equipped to handle poor behavior by corporate actors
compared with human ones. You can't jail a Corporation, and while you can kill
one via revocation of charter, there is nothing to keep the same people from
gathering together to do it again under a new corporate identity.

