Dish is the first company to be fined by the FCC due to the Space Junk Rule

With a growing number of satellites in orbit and space debris becoming an increasing problem, the Federal Communications Commission announced Tuesday that for the first time it had fined a company for failing to find a dead satellite on the planet. properly removed.

The commission said that as part of a settlement, Dish, the television provider, had agreed to pay a $150,000 fine for failing to move its defunct EchoStar-7 broadcast satellite to a higher altitude and into a designated space junkyard to push where it would pose little threat. from collisions with active communications satellites and other spacecraft.

As part of the settlement, Dish admitted liability, the FCC said.

Commercial broadcast satellites such as EchoStar-7 require an FCC license to operate in space. The license includes a commitment by the operator to properly dispose of the satellite at the end of its life.

A Dish spokeswoman said Tuesday that EchoStar-7, launched in 2002, was an older satellite that was “explicitly exempt from the FCC’s rule requiring a minimum removal orbit.”

But in 2012, Dish agreed to comply with a minimum removal track of 300 kilometers, or about 185 miles, above its original track as it sought to change the terms of its permit.

The fine imposed by the FCC on Dish lays the groundwork for future FCC enforcement of space debris cleanup regulations, which are expected to play a greater role as satellites continue to proliferate and humanity becomes increasingly dependent on them.

“As satellite operations become more prevalent and the space economy accelerates, we must be sure operators are meeting their obligations,” Loyaan A. Egal, chief of the FCC’s enforcement bureau, said in a press release.

“This is a groundbreaking settlement that makes it very clear that the FCC has strong enforcement power and the ability to enforce its critically important space debris rules,” he added.

The FCC requires companies to place a satellite that has reached the end of its life cycle into an orbit 200 miles above its operational orbit. When the 20-year-old EchoStar-7 satellite reached the end of its life last year, it was only 76 miles (122 kilometers) above its operational orbit, less than half the required distance, the commission said.

During its service, the satellite operated in a so-called geostationary orbit, approximately 36,000 kilometers above the equator, where television, weather and military satellites operate.

“It’s a very valuable piece of space, and quite crowded when it comes to these things,” says Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at Harvard University’s Smithsonian Observatory.

“So if you had a big geographic collision with a lot of debris there, that would be really bad,” he added, referring to geostationary orbit. “So we try to be careful and keep it geo-free of dead satellites.”

There are about 500 satellites in geostationary orbit, Mr. McDowell said. They are responsible for a portion of the estimated 5,500 operating satellites orbiting the Earth Government Accountability Office Report.

Most of the satellites, about 4,500, are in a so-called lower Earth orbit, about 2,000 kilometers above Earth, according to the report.

Dish had predicted that the satellite would have enough fuel to put itself into the required orbit by May 2022, but the calculation was wrong and the satellite ran out of fuel three months earlier, the FCC said.

“They misjudged how much fuel they had left,” Mr McDowell said. “I think that’s more culpable than, ‘Oh, we had an unexpected failure and we couldn’t afford it.’”

While a single dead satellite is unlikely to pose a catastrophic threat to the active satellites in orbit, Mr McDowell said, disposal rules must be respected.

“How many would it take?” he asked. “We don’t want to know.”