“But it’s inconceivable that [all these companies] will do what they’ve announced they plan to do.” In which case a tortuous bureaucracy that defers, delays, and disrupts business plans might be just what space needs. The precise nature and origin of the blasts of radio waves is unknown. At first, spectrum seemed to be a solvable problem. Now, as the heavens fill with more satellites, the scramble for radio frequency slots is growing ever more fractious. Tiny flying insect robot has four wings and weighs under a gram Swarm Technologies is no stranger to regulatory tussles. At 35,786 kilometers (22,236 miles), the orbital speed matches Earth’s rotation. In April, Ligado noted in a meeting with the FCC that the agency had been considering its latest application for over 1,000 days.
They laugh and poke fun at those of us that believe. The incentive for companies to apply for frequencies as soon as possible also means that they have to file requests at the ITU and FCC long before their satellites have been built or, sometimes, even fully designed. Farrar believes that satellites and ground stations will be regularly forced to pause operation until the risk of interference subsides, thus dramatically reducing their capacity and threatening already shaky business plans. Some of these telescopes are finally paying off. More “fast radio bursts" – bright, short-lived pulses of radio waves that come from across the universe – have been detected by astronomers. It was pure luck that all 36 of the antennae that make up the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) were pointed in the same direction, towards the area in the sky where the FRB flashed.That allowed researchers to combine data from all of the antennae and calculate where in the universe it came from – around 13,000 light years from the centre of its home galaxy, which is 4 billion light years away from us. Could they have chosen a worse time to call? Countries were allocated slots above their longitude, and then individual satellites were allowed to take up residence on a first-come, first-served basis. Its host galaxy is 30 times brighter, with light dominated by older stars, whereas The differences are important because, even though FRBs are constantly lighting up all over the universe, we don’t know what causes them. Multiplexing systems allow operators to share spectrum by finely slicing time slots and frequency channels as well as by encoding signals so that many different messages can be transmitted simultaneously. But there is no clear mechanism for such a global spectrum auction.In any case, though converting free allocations of satellite frequencies into tradeable rights might offer incentives for cooperation over obstruction, it would be a fraught process at a global scale. Who gets to send radio waves in space?