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NOAA Requires License For Photos of the Earth
Teancum writes "In an interesting show of the level of regulations private spacecraft designers have to go through, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has demanded that American participants of the Google Lunar X Prize obtain a license if their spacecraft are 'capable of actively or passively sensing the Earth's surface, including
bodies of water, from space by making use of the properties of the electromagnetic waves emitted, reflected, or diffracted by the sensed objects.' What prompted NOAA to ask for this license came from a visit by the XPrize staff to the NOAA offices in Maryland. What is going to happen when 'space tourists' bring their private cameras along for the ride?"
The Space sensing act of when??
Is the US government the only entity that can image the planet from orbit?
What, are they scared I might take a photo of the aliens in Area51?
And what if I'm snapping away at Africa? Australia?
Do I go to jail or what??
Ridiculous.
Well then, looks like the winner of the Lunar X Prize won't launch in the US, and probably won't start a business here either.
The rest of the world is nowadays inclined to treat american laws with a huge "fuck you".
Seriously, the russians (already doing it) and - god help us all - the british (virgin) are the ones already strongly involved in private space tourism. America sucks so much these days.
All Soviet jokes aside, anyone notice how much the United States is resembling more and more the old school buffoons of the USSR ? It was illegal to possess accurate maps in the old USSR, to protect state secrets. Now we have the US claim you need a license to take a picture of the earth. It's just a 21st century version of screaming, "Papers Please". I for one, don't hail our old overlords.
It seems like it would be hard to enforce jurisdiction in space
But that's really the whole point you see; extending government jurisdiction into space. Suppose Virgin Galactic builds a space hotel, is it an independent nation? A privately owned holding not subject to any man made laws? What about 100 years from now, I'm sure the governments of Earth would prefer to have control over Lunar He3 resources. To do that they need to start slowly establishing authority in space. Next, any space hotel will be declared to be under the control of the home nation of the corporation that builds/operates it. Then that nation just expands it's sphere of influence in the name of security,exploration and manifest destiny. Really it's just a land grab.
We are all just people.
It looks like the purpose is to protect the commercial interests of private space companies. If all the sudden people are launching rockets and giving away the data for free, that hurts space commerce. ... This policy probably had good intentions, but is now very out of date.
Saying "if other people make money doing X, we're going to pass a law preventing you from doing X for free" never has good intentions. It can only be a favor to existing commercial interests in return for their lining politicians' pockets.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Even for Slashdot, this is an overreaction. This is nothing more or less than a country having a law on the books that, read literally, applies to a situation that nobody envisioned when the law was originally written.
When you read the law in question, it was meant to regulate satellite operators from giving space images of sensitive American installations to not-so-friendly people. Seems pretty reasonable not to want the ABC Satellite Company to give high resolution images of military facilities to the Russians and Chinese, doesn't it? Unfortunately the way it was drafted it also applies to space tourists.
The law isn't stupid, it's just broader than anyone realized at the time Stupidity would be actually prosecuting anyone for taking a few snapshots out the spacecraft window without a license.
My hometown still has a law on the books that cars aren't allowed to scare the horses travelling down Main Street. Anyone want to get up in arms about that one while we're at it?
If Cuba ever gets its act together, it could become the hub of private space.
"The fight for freedom has only just begun." - Geert Wilders
What's scary is that I can't tell if you're serious.
The NOAA doesn't have any jurisdiction outside the US to require a license for anything done there. Spacecraft orbiting over the US are not part of the US, despite simpleminded interpretations of "air rights" regulation. Electromagnetic waves coming from the Earth's surface outside US boundaries are not subject to any NOAA jurisdiction. And NOAA doesn't have jurisdiction over electromagnetic waves coming from private property, or publicly viewable surfaces of any government property, whether publicly physically accessible like parks and roads or even the outside of NOAA buildings.
In fact, I don't see anywhere in the Constitution where NOAA has any power to regulate anything, certainly not photography of objects viewable by people who are standing somewhere legally.
NOAA can take its license requirement and stick it up its... er, NOAA doesn't even have one of those.
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make install -not war
My hometown still has a law on the books that cars aren't allowed to scare the horses travelling down Main Street. Anyone want to get up in arms about that one while we're at it?
If I were living in your town, I certainly might complain if some heavily lobbied government group suddenly started forcing people to buy licenses based on that law.
-FL