Re:FCC fines Swarm $900K for unauthorized satellite launch
by Sargos on Friday December 21, 2018 @02:26PM
(#18735813)
You can track a swarm microsat. The government could even help them make sure they orbited correctly and wouldn't hit the ISS. That's what good governance is. Bad governance is telling everyone no you can't do something unless we deem you worthy of our time.
Re:FCC fines Swarm $900K for unauthorized satellite launch
by BillinghamJ on Friday December 21, 2018 @05:57PM
(#18737451)
These specific ones cannot be reliably tracked as they are smaller than normal cubesats.
When we were young lots of rules didn't make sense. As we got older we realized many of these were to keep us safe from things we weren't old enough to understand yet.
The US has quite a number of spy satellites that we can't detect, even with our own detection methods. Some are covered in vantablack and radar absorbing shields, others hide behind giant mirrors that reflect the darkness of space back down towards the earth.
How would your opinion change if a Swarm microsat had crashed in to a 6 billion dollar satellite and disabled it? What if it threw that bird out of orbit and it hit the ISS, killing everyone on board?