This is technically not as insane as the title sounds; mostly I was bemusedly wondering about the application of national, international, and space law. Mostly inspired by similar musings in The Martian
Okay, the setup? I’m an American citizen, and I pay Elon Musk to take me along on a manned Mars mission, launching out of Texas. While there, I decide to live out my other lifelong dream of owning and operating a UHF commercial TV station, and promptly set one up out of scraps and parts of vital backup systems, and voila! I’m now Space Ted Turner.
My question is…am I now, even technically, in legal trouble?
As Article VIII of the Outer Space Treaty puts it, “A State Party to the Treaty on whose registry an object launched into outer space is carried shall retain jurisdiction and control over such object, and over any personnel thereof, while in outer space or on a celestial body.” So does this mean I’m going to get in trouble with the FCC, assuming I didn’t get the proper broadcasting licenses?
How much worse is it going to be for me if I start rerunning episodes of a TV series I don’t own, which ALREADY had licensing issues with music and movie clips in it, and I run it with profanity-laden commercial breaks featuring cigarette ads, before the Watershed Hour?
This is an interesting question. Are you in trouble with the FCC if you broadcast on a frequency they consider restricted…in the middle of the ocean or in Antarctica? Note I am assuming no significant interference is detected from your transmission anywhere in US territory.
As I understand, the FCC is a US government agency and only has jurisdiction over companies that do business in the US. So if you don’t have any presence in the US or do business with US companies, then you can broadcast all you want. You can’t contract with US companies to buy programming, sell ads, etc.
That 20-minute communications delay is going to make the “Our tenth caller will receive two free tickets to Disaster Area!” contests problematic, to say the least.
Britain has a long history of dealing with offshore broadcasters. Way back in 1933 Radio Luxembourg was using what was then the most powerful privately owned transmitter in the world to transmit commercial radio, supported by advertising. At that time the BBC had a monopoly and no advertising was allowed.
In the early 1960’s pop music stations such as Radio Caroline and Radio London started to broadcast on medium wave to the UK from offshore ships or disused sea forts. At the time, these [pirate radio] stations were not illegal because they were broadcasting from international waters. (Not quite Mars – but far enough away to get around the law.) In 1967, the UK Government closed the international waters loophole via the Marine Broadcasting Offences Act of 1967, although Radio Caroline would continue to broadcast in various forms right up to 1990.
I imagine that if you start broadcasting unacceptable content from Mars, Governments around the works would try to outlaw it by passing a Space Broadcasting Offences Act or similar. With all the devices we have these days to receive transmissions; history suggests that it would fail to stop you.
There are (very likely) ITU regulations covering space, so those would apply to Mars. I’m guessing even NASA has to get approval for (e.g.) Curiosity’s radios.
Actually, the FCC does not have jurisdiction over companies, regardless of where they do business, or even where they are based. They have jurisdiction over devices (and users of those devices) that are currently emitting RF radiation, and are being used within US territory. Insofar as a company sells an RF-emitting device in the US, they have to comply with FCC regulations, not because the FCC has any jurisdiction over them, but merely because the Federal Trade Commission (FTC, a different federal regulatory agency) can and will bust them for selling something illegal to use, if they don’t. That’s what that “This device complies with FCC Part 15” stuff on the electronics you buy is all about. The FCC sets regulations on what it can emit, if you use it within US territory. The FTC sets regulations on whether you can sell it. That’s not at all the same as the FCC itself having ‘jurisdiction’ over the company.
If you are transmitting from somewhere outside US territorial jurisdiction, as well as the jurisdiction of any other nation, the FCC only has authority to regulate you (as a user of an RF-emitting device) to the same extent as any other nation’s FCC-equivalent agency has, according to international agreements on dealing with transmitters in international waters/airspace/outer-space. Basically, not much, unless you’re a US national/citizen/resident-alien (or a national/citizen/resident-alien of the nation that wants to do something about you). As a practical matter, they won’t do anything about you, unless you’re interfering with something they consider important. If you’re transmitting from Mars, even if you have a 100 megawatt transmitter, you’re not going to be interfering with anything anyone cares enough about to try and stop you.
BUT!!! A 100 kiloton nuclear warhead weighs a lot less than the last rover NASA sent to Mars. If they want to shut you down, they CAN shut you down. For a lot cheaper than it cost you to get there to set up your transmitter in the first place.
Uhh, yeah? The point of that is you can set up on Mars. Uncle Sam probably won’t shut you down, even if you’re some illegal moron. Just so long as you don’t interfere with something Uncle Sam wants to be transmitted. You might want to go reread what I wrote. It might not look like what you thought you just read. :rolleyes:
Yeah - if you’re interested in the reaction of the US Government to this scheme, one big issue will be getting them to take any notice.
Best to plan on gigawatt-level transmit power and a fancy antenna system. Elon may balk when he sees the amount of checked baggage you plan to travel with.
And be prepared to pay a lot to the Mars Electric Company for those multi-gigawatts of power your station is using.
And don’t think you can set up a solar array to generate your own power. Even if you could get that many solar panels to Mars, remember that it’s further away from the sun, so you’d need many more panels there. And you’d have to worry about dust on the panels limiting efficiency. Plus they’d only work during the day.
Also, the station would only broadcast toward Earth during, at most, half of the Martian day. The rest of the time it would be aiming somewhere out into space. Even that would probably need moving antennas to keep it aimed at Earth at all. And much of the time, it will be night on Earth – not many people watch TV during the middle of the night.
Really, for less money, you could just buy time on enough of Earth’s existing broadcast or cable media to reach a bigger percent of the human audience.
I doubt Sputnik’s initial BEEP-BEEP-BEEP was FCC-approved. Mexican border blasters sure weren’t. But don’t sweat the FCC. Any transmitter you can boost into orbit (from an offshore platform, maybe? With balloons and JATOs?) can broadcast Earthward till a noxious player shoots you down. Recall that AE Clarke invented geosynchronous satellites for a story where China beamed explicit pr0n down to Western TVs to demoralize 1st-world societies. A pr0n-sat now would be irrelevant. So what could you broadcast that would provoke a sat-killer response?
