<story><title>FCC Accuses Stealthy Startup of Launching Rogue Satellites</title><url>https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/aerospace/satellites/fcc-accuses-stealthy-startup-of-launching-rogue-satellites</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ChuckMcM</author><text>Wow, I love this story. It raises so many intriguing issues in one small space.&lt;p&gt;First, while the FCC clearly has US authority over spectrum, how is it that its charter includes satellite launches? Or conversely, if they SpaceBees never turn on did they violate the license? And on what basis does the FCC get to evaluate the risk of other things in orbit, isn&amp;#x27;t that NORAD&amp;#x27;s job? And what if this had been a startup in Bangalore or Mumbai, would they be getting crap from the FCC for launching the very same satellites?&lt;p&gt;Now I understand the leverage the FCC can use with US based launch services, sort &amp;quot;Follow our rules and do what we say or we will have the FAA pull your launch permit.&amp;quot; but that leverage doesn&amp;#x27;t really exist for foreign launch services. Heck the Russians might launch stuff like this just to irritate the FCC and tweak our noses.&lt;p&gt;And it raises a whole different set of questions about cubesats. How closely are they inspected at Integration time? Is is possible to create a cubesat that looks and smells like it is doing one mission but is actually doing a different mission? What happens when someone launches an orbital spy satellite network? Not the one you would expect taking pictures of people&amp;#x27;s back yards, but a collection of satellites with large lenses that are looking &lt;i&gt;up&lt;/i&gt; and &lt;i&gt;over&lt;/i&gt; at the things coming up from the ground. Imagine an ion engine powered small sat that works its way up to GEO and snaps pictures of all the satellites it can find and beams those images down to earth.&lt;p&gt;Let&amp;#x27;s say their quad systems stays under the weight of the typical cubesat limit of 1.33kg. That means they could launch 100,000+ satellites on a single F9 load. And while that would be silly (They would all be in a very similar orbit) it suggests how easily someone could (in theory) just &amp;quot;throw up&amp;quot; a covert microwave based communication network on a very small number of launches.&lt;p&gt;These are definitely 21st century sorts of problems :-).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>olympus</author><text>The short answer is that the Outer Space Treaty states that all commercial satellites are under the jurisdiction of the country in which the company exists, regardless of where they are launched.  SpaceBees is a California based company, so the US government is the ones they answer to, not the country they hired to launch their stuff.  Since satellites must communicate and could potentially disrupt the communications of others, the FCC gets a say in what goes on.  The FCC is not the only authority in town, just the ones taking action here.&lt;p&gt;As far as satellites with covert missions or missions other than what is publicly stated, we should probably assume they already exist.  The NRO is pretty sneaky and the USAF has never stated what the heck the X-37 is doing.  There&amp;#x27;s a good chance that they have other satellites with publicly acknowledged missions that are doing something else behind the scenes.  They are probably attempting to guard against that same behavior from others as well.&lt;p&gt;Doing optical imaging probably isn&amp;#x27;t feasible for a cubesat, it takes quite a bit of fuel to get next to another satellite and not hit it, so a cubesat can&amp;#x27;t zip up to dozens of satellites to get detailed images with a smartphone size sensor- it would run out of fuel too quickly.  Instead, optical satellites will probably have their own orbit and accept that they will be far away from their targets.  Large distances require a huge aperture if you want a good image, but it&amp;#x27;s not hard to imagine a satellite such as Hubble occasionally rotating to catch an image of Russian or Chinese tech.  Plus, the NRO has sent up several &lt;i&gt;very&lt;/i&gt; large payloads that we don&amp;#x27;t know what they do, so there&amp;#x27;s probably a large aperture imaging satellite snapping images we don&amp;#x27;t know about.  What cubesats can do is extend long antennas that were folded up for launch.  A small cubesat could be effective at RF surveillance and a constellation of cubesats and good signal processing could provide a surveillance system for other satellites that could spot various communication types and record the orbital information of the satellites doing the transmitting.</text></comment>
<story><title>FCC Accuses Stealthy Startup of Launching Rogue Satellites</title><url>https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/aerospace/satellites/fcc-accuses-stealthy-startup-of-launching-rogue-satellites</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ChuckMcM</author><text>Wow, I love this story. It raises so many intriguing issues in one small space.&lt;p&gt;First, while the FCC clearly has US authority over spectrum, how is it that its charter includes satellite launches? Or conversely, if they SpaceBees never turn on did they violate the license? And on what basis does the FCC get to evaluate the risk of other things in orbit, isn&amp;#x27;t that NORAD&amp;#x27;s job? And what if this had been a startup in Bangalore or Mumbai, would they be getting crap from the FCC for launching the very same satellites?&lt;p&gt;Now I understand the leverage the FCC can use with US based launch services, sort &amp;quot;Follow our rules and do what we say or we will have the FAA pull your launch permit.&amp;quot; but that leverage doesn&amp;#x27;t really exist for foreign launch services. Heck the Russians might launch stuff like this just to irritate the FCC and tweak our noses.&lt;p&gt;And it raises a whole different set of questions about cubesats. How closely are they inspected at Integration time? Is is possible to create a cubesat that looks and smells like it is doing one mission but is actually doing a different mission? What happens when someone launches an orbital spy satellite network? Not the one you would expect taking pictures of people&amp;#x27;s back yards, but a collection of satellites with large lenses that are looking &lt;i&gt;up&lt;/i&gt; and &lt;i&gt;over&lt;/i&gt; at the things coming up from the ground. Imagine an ion engine powered small sat that works its way up to GEO and snaps pictures of all the satellites it can find and beams those images down to earth.&lt;p&gt;Let&amp;#x27;s say their quad systems stays under the weight of the typical cubesat limit of 1.33kg. That means they could launch 100,000+ satellites on a single F9 load. And while that would be silly (They would all be in a very similar orbit) it suggests how easily someone could (in theory) just &amp;quot;throw up&amp;quot; a covert microwave based communication network on a very small number of launches.&lt;p&gt;These are definitely 21st century sorts of problems :-).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>teej</author><text>Putting on my tin foil hat.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Is is possible to create a cubesat that looks and smells like it is doing one mission but is actually doing a different mission?&lt;p&gt;You mean like Zuma which SpaceX launched and then was declared as &amp;quot;lost&amp;quot; but might have secretly been designed to &lt;i&gt;look&lt;/i&gt; like it was lost?&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.theverge.com&amp;#x2F;2018&amp;#x2F;1&amp;#x2F;9&amp;#x2F;16866806&amp;#x2F;spacex-zuma-mission-failure-northrop-grumman-classified-falcon-9-rocket&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.theverge.com&amp;#x2F;2018&amp;#x2F;1&amp;#x2F;9&amp;#x2F;16866806&amp;#x2F;spacex-zuma-missi...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>