Not everything went as planned when American Dish had to retire the EchoStar-7 satellite.
Improper parking can result in penalties. This is what the American mobile phone and television service company Dish witnessed when it received the first fine in history for littering on spatial waste on Monday evening. The fine amounted to $150,000, equivalent to just over 1.6 million kroner. He writes, among other things Reuters.
According to the news agency, they simply failed to place the former TV satellite in the right place when it was scheduled to be deorbited.
EchoStar-7 was launched in 2002 and has been operating in geostationary orbit around the Earth. That is, as seen from Earth, it appears as if it is standing in the same place in the sky all the time. The US Communications Commission stated that the problems arose when the service was scheduled to be retired Federal Communications Commission In a press release.
According to the plan, Dish was supposed to move the satellite to a point 300 kilometers above where it went into orbit, but before it got that far it ran out of fuel and it ended up only 122 kilometers above where it had previously entered orbit. .
– At this low altitude, it could create space junk challenges, the FCC wrote in the press release
There are nearly 9,000 satellites in Earth orbit, compared to about 2,000 five years ago, he says. Bloomberg. SpaceX’s Starlink, which provides internet to places that don’t have a fixed connection, accounts for a large portion of that increase, and the FCC has applications for more than 56,000 satellites to consider. Among others from Amazon’s Kuiper project, which wants to provide a similar service.
The FCC has not made any specific findings that EchoStar-7 raises any safety concerns regarding space debris, Desch wrote in an email to Bloomberg.
The dish accepted the fine.
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