Dish Dealt First-Ever Space-Debris Fine For Misparking Satellite (bloomberg.com) 63
Todd Shields and Loren Grush reporting via Bloomberg: Dish Network Corp. was fined $150,000 by US regulators for leaving a retired satellite parked in the wrong place in space, reflecting official concern over the growing amount of debris orbiting Earth and the potential for mishaps. The Federal Communications Commission called the action its first to enforce safeguards against orbital debris. "This is a breakthrough settlement, making very clear the FCC has strong enforcement authority and capability to enforce its vitally important space debris rules," Loyaan A. Egal, the agency's enforcement bureau chief, said in a statement.
Dish's EchoStar-7 satellite, which relayed pay-TV signals, ran short of fuel, and the company retired it at an altitude roughly 76 miles (122 kilometers) above its operational orbit. It was supposed to have been parked 186 miles above its operational orbit, the FCC said in an order (PDF). The company admitted it failed to park EchoStar-7 as authorized. It agreed to implement a compliance plan and pay a $150,000 civil penalty, the FCC said.
Dish's EchoStar-7 satellite, which relayed pay-TV signals, ran short of fuel, and the company retired it at an altitude roughly 76 miles (122 kilometers) above its operational orbit. It was supposed to have been parked 186 miles above its operational orbit, the FCC said in an order (PDF). The company admitted it failed to park EchoStar-7 as authorized. It agreed to implement a compliance plan and pay a $150,000 civil penalty, the FCC said.
Mispark? (Score:1)
Mispark? That is not a real word. It looks like there is a wiktionary entry on it, but that must be some kind of deliberate trolling.
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If this malparkage is not remedied within 72 hours, their satellite will be thrown into the Pacific Ocean at their expense.
Re: Mispark? (Score:2, Offtopic)
If only they disparked instead.
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If they are concerned about space debris, why have it planned to orbit at 186 miles up at all?
Because Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.
So, your homework assignment is to calculate the total volume in, say, 175 to 190 miles altitude and +/- 20 degrees latitude. Compare with total volume of ALL satellites in any orbit
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Re: Mispark? (Score:2)
The parking orbit is 186 miles above the operational orbit, which was over 20,000 miles from the surface. The energy to get something back down from geosynchronous orbit is immense, so we instead move it a short ways out.
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Or crushed into a cube [youtube.com].
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How can you "park" a satellite anyway? My guess is that a "parked" satellite would quickly fall down to Earth! /s
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Why would it? Sats are in freefall and without propulsion most of the time.
If it wasn't for the tiiiiiny little bit of atmosphere up there, their orbit would never decay and they'd orbit forever. Some of the debris have been up there for over half a century. Vanguard 1 [wikipedia.org] is still up there, launched in 1958.
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How can you "park" a satellite anyway? My guess is that a "parked" satellite would quickly fall down to Earth! /s
Not sure about your use of the sarcasm tag; your question seems genuine enough. The answer is: Move it to a location where its net acceleration is zero -- like any stable orbit.
Re:Mispark? (Score:4, Informative)
For this kind of satellite, you move it to a graveyard orbit [wikipedia.org] and passivate it.
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Passivate? That's a fantastic word. How have I not heard that word before?
Now I have a new way to insult the coworkers. "Oh, he passivated his brain."
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Mispark? That is not a real word. It looks like there is a wiktionary entry on it, but that must be some kind of deliberate trolling.
Is it any different than misspoke? If you're so concerned about this word, might want to notify these folks [sciencedirectassets.com] since they use that very word in their scientific paper.
Popular media outlets routinely cite micromobility parking violations (see, for example, Bendix, 2018), and 14% of complaints during Portland's scooter pilot program mentioned misparked scooters (Portland Bureau of Transportation, 2018).
Notify these folks as well. [researchgate.net]
While research suggests that concerns about misparked scooters are overblown, understanding why travelers mispark could inform interventions to increase parking compliance
And these folks [intelligenttransport.com] too.
Lime says people can email the company to report misparked or vandalised scooters and will now be able to submit a what3words location to speed up the recovery process.
If you're really ambitious, go after Ottawa [ottawa.ca].
Shared e-scooter providers have committed to respond to misparked e-scooters within 15 minutes. Residents can report misparked e-scooters, by using the City’s dedicated e-form or calling 311. To assist with reporting, each e-scooter has a printed number on it to identify the e-scooter in question.
Would you like to know more?
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Mispark? That is not a real word.
Looked in your dictionary? Half of English is botched loan words made from a mix of greek and latin roots and the other half is just something Chaucer wrote in a book once, probably misspelled because he was in a hurry. Anything that looks vaguely like a valid word is valid English.
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I swear one spelling mispake is all it takes to spark off the puns around here.
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Mispark? That is not a real word. It looks like there is a wiktionary entry on it, but that must be some kind of deliberate trolling.
No words are real words, right until someone uses them to communicate. We're not speaking French, the dictionary isn't an arbiter of what is and isn't a word like it is in the French language. We don't have a word czar, the dictionary and its contents is just a reflection of common use of language and you can be your parking abilities that if we use the word mispark more often then mispark will find its way in every dictionary.
1st parking ticket in space (Score:3)
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Probably not, but the FCC may put a boot on it until the fine is paid.
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Didn't they see the handicapped license plate? It's old and retired, give it a damn break if it parks sideways taking up two spots close to the entrance.
Also L.Egal? Can't be real.
No parking in rear. Prosecutors will be violated.
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They'll use it for missile target practice.
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The last bit of tracked debris from the target satellite (Solwind/P78-1) came down a bit shy nineteen years after the antisatellite test. I guess depending on how you work your plurals that could be decades with an s on the end.
Its debris field also led to a pretty cool graph on page five of this document: https://orbitaldebris.jsc.nasa... [nasa.gov]
Love the correlation between solar activity and deorbiting. Sun output goes up. Atmosphere goes up. Drag goes up. Manmade bits go down.
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Then instead of one large piece of debris, you have thousands of tiny high speed fragments of debris.
Unless your missile is going to latch onto it and push it out of the way.
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Put the CEO in an orange space suit. Give him a bag and a pointy stick and tell him to pick up the space litter.
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They would hope so. That $150,000 is just the fine. The "compliance plan" is probably going to be vastly more expensive and I'm sure they would love for it to be towed for them.
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The amount is inconsequential. 10X starts to be noticeable. 100X would have been a somewhat meaningful. How about sanctions? Like denying launch of any other satellites for x years? Or maybe forfeiting terrestrial bandwidth?
You can't just tap them, you got to punch them in the mouth. And make it hurt past taking a shower. Rich guys consider fines a cost of doing business as they damned well care to.
Cobra Effect In Progress (Score:1)
"This is a breakthrough settlement, making very clear the FCC has strong enforcement authority and capability to enforce its vitally important space debris rules," Loyaan A. Egal, the agency's enforcement bureau chief, said in a statement.
Hmm...
“Wherever I'm going, I'll be there to apply the formula. I'll keep the secret intact.
It's simple arithmetic.
It's a story problem.
If a new car built by my company leaves Chicago traveling west at 60 miles per hour, and the rear differential locks up, and the car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside, does my company initiate a recall?
You take the population of vehicles in the field (A) and multiple it by the probable rate of failure (B), then multiply the result by the average cost of an out-of-court settlement (C).
A times B times C equals X. This is what it will cost if we don't initiate a recall.
If X is greater than the cost of a recall, we recall the cars and no one gets hurt.
If X is less than the cost of a recall, then we don't recall.”
– unnamed protagonist, "Fight Club"by Palahniuk
The FCC perhaps is praising itself too much for showing what it does when it tipping its hand.
If the only thing they can do for enforcement is a fine, that just means anyone wondering what the equivalent cost of a recall is now can approximate it and apply the formula; it also means a company running satellites can now know to restructure into smaller companies operating as cells under an umbrella company (think Google and YouTube under Alphabet) an
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The first rule of Fight Club is: It's fiction. You might as well cite Thomas Harris as evidence of how real-world serial cannibals behave.
The National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act was passed in 1966, and ever since then, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has had the authority to order auto manufacturers to recall vehicles.
Fight Club was published in 1996, thirty years later, after the NHTSA had used that authority many, many times.
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But that part is very real and a very real part of risk management. If the cost of an event times the chance of that event happening is lower than the cost to avoid it, avoiding it is not a sound strategy. It's cheaper to just accept the risk.
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If you want to appeal to what people actually do, that passage also ignores reputational risk, and normal people don't ignore that. Granted, "reputational risk" wasn't part of the vernacular in 1986, but people knew about "doing the right thing" long before that.
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Goodwill loss is certainly part of corporate risk assessment.
Doing the right thing isn't.
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Doing the right thing isn't.
Maybe it seems that way to ahistoric sociopaths, but part of appealing for someone to do the right thing has always been that others will find out about the person doing an evil thing.
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Yeah, CEOs really give 2 fucks about what you think about them.
Considering it was geostationary (Score:5, Interesting)
The fine make a lot of sense. Geostationary orbits are extremely valuable and extremely limited. So when a satellite reaches end of life, it needs to be moved out the way, so its spot can be used by another satellite. And since geostationary is so high it's impractical to deorbit the old satellite, so instead they boost them to a higher orbit to get them out of the way.
Re:Considering it was geostationary (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes a fine would make sense. But considering it costs north of $100 Million to put a satellite in orbit, this fine is a rounding error. Also paying a one-off fine is probably the cheapest way to deal with a discarded satellite. More like a disposal surcharge than anything else. At least then call it what it is
Re:Considering it was geostationary (Score:5, Interesting)
Apparently the fuel cost to reach the graveyard orbit it equivalent to 3 months of keeping the satellite "on-station".
The fine may need to be adjusted to be equivalent of 2 years of "economic benefit"of continued operation to provide sufficient incentive for companies to "do the right thing".
Re:Considering it was geostationary (Score:5, Insightful)
A fine that costs less than avoiding the fine becomes part of the operational costs.
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If you accidentally damage someone's property, should you be charged with vandalism and thrown in jail for the maximum allowable sentence?
You probably wouldn't agree with that, because intent matters. So the question here is, did they deliberately under-fuel it to save money, or was it just a cock up? Unfortunately TFA doesn't say, and I can't find any information on what exactly happened.
And the next time it happens, did they learn their lesson or did they allow the same thing to happen again? Was it delib
Re:Considering it was geostationary (Score:4, Insightful)
Intent matters, but it is very hard to prove.
But you will notice that repeat offenders, even if only accidental, will eventually be barred from engaging in the activity that caused damage. If you keep ramming other cars, intentionally or not, you will lose your license to operate yours.
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Only if a fine is consistent punishment. They often are not. There's a difference between getting fined for doing something once, vs for repeat behaviour. This is why comparatively tiny fines often do actually force companies to change their behaviour.
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Can you list 10 times companies with a market cap over 1 billion dollars [pinky] were fined and completely changed?
Yes I specifically gave big numbers because small companies are more likely to change.
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Well, Volkswagen did.
Granted, only after some of their high-ranking managers went to jail...
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It still would have been far cheaper to reserve enough fuel and not wait so long. Part of their settlement besides the fine is to implement a compliance plan. I can only imagine that this compliance plan would be far more expensive than the fine. And hopefully the FCC is authorized to continue to fine if they don't meet the compliance plan. Unless their compliance plan only has to apply to future satellite de-orbits, which....ugghhh...
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Well... not really. Sending a sat up there is expensive. Really, really expensive. Station-keeping takes minute fuel amounts while changing the orbit constitutes a considerable cost. I'd have to pull up the details again, but the fuel amount you'd have to set aside for graveyarding the sat is the equivalent of half a year (or even more) of operation.
You also don't de-orbit those sats. That would be even MORE expensive. You put them into a higher orbit (aptly named graveyard orbit [wikipedia.org]. For large sats that have t
compliance plan (Score:2)
From the referenced FCC order:
"To settle this matter, DISH admits that it failed to operate the EchoStar-7 satellite in accordance with its authorization, will implement a compliance plan, and will pay a $150,000 civil penalty."
The compliance plan is what is supposed to do the magic, IMHO.
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"We promise we'll be good now".
The key element is there, now filter it through legal and marketing to give it some beef and make it unreadable drivel and we're set.
Re: Considering it was geostationary (Score:2)
Maybe this first fine was more symbolic than trying to be properly penalising? Basically showing that they can and will fine. In the future I could imagine with the right support they could even build up a proper fine framework and cost table.
FCC? FAA? (Score:2)
Space belongs to no country. That's by international treaty. There are some treaties that treat special parts of space differently, like, for example, geostationary earth orbits and positions.
The US FCC is entrusted with communication, airwaves, frequences, etc. IMHO they don't have any authority to levy fines for operators who mispark satellites any more than they have authority to fine someone who puts a non-working antenna at an unlicensed spot in the US.
The US FAA may have some authority when it com
Re: FCC? FAA? (Score:2)
Look at the pdf order and not the news article. The key issue is that before the satellite was even launched, the company had to get a license that detailed the operation of the satellite and its eventual move into a disposal orbit at its end of life. Basically, they signed a contract. And now, they violated that same contract and the FCC is holding them to the contract terms. It's not a case of the FCC going "that company over there did something we don't like and therefore we're gonna fine them." It's a c
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"Upon mission completion, the ECHOSTAR-7 satellite will be maneuvered to a disposal orbit at least 300 km above its operational geostationary orbit.1 Based on data from the satellite manufacturer, less than 11 kg of fuel will be
p.s. (Score:2)
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Look at it as a contractual agreement with the government that Dish had to agree to in order to do business within the USA. Dish breached the terms of the contract, and have to pay the specified fine.
Why not send it back to earth to burn up (Score:1)
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You're missing the ability to read my friend.
> ran short of fuel
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The Echostar fleet of satellites are up in geostationary orbit (GSO) which is way way higher than the low earth orbit (LEO). LEO takes a relatively small amount of change in velocity to change its orbit to the point where atmospheric drag has increased to the point of finishing the deorbit in a short period of time. So of all the things you can do with a satellite in LEO at end of life, that is the general approach. Up at GSO, all the low delta v options result in risky and long term orbits to get bac
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A drop in the bucket.. (Score:2)
Fines should be a percentage of annual revenue the company makes as this will have long lasting effects.
Who gets the money? (Score:2)
I mean, yes, it's not a lot of money but who gets it?
parking fine (Score:1)