On March 7, Serafini sent an email to Swarm’s CEO, Sara Spangelo, saying the agency had begun an investigation of the company’s “apparent unauthorized launch.” Swarm’s applications for other operations were also put on hold, including a launch in April.

A spokesperson for the U.S. Strategic Command’s Joint Functional Component Command for Space, which maintains the Space Surveillance Network, says the unit was able to spot the SpaceBees in orbit shortly after they launched. The satellites are too small to track, but not too small to be seen. And there’s no hiding from the military, says Scott Chapman, a satellite tracker who, like Coletta, has been following the SpaceBees with antennas on the roof of his home in Virginia. Aside from classified satellites, all objects launched into space get tracked and logged into databases that can be accessed online.

“Ground-based radar and the military—they know exactly what every nut, bolt, and screw floating around in orbit is. On your computer screen, you could probably follow the orbit of a screwdriver that some astronaut accidentally let go of when he was repairing something,” Chapman says. “Whether someone is authorized or not to put something in orbit, once it’s up there, it’s tracked.”

So, what should be done about these SpaceBees?

The FCC completed a “fact-finding inquiry” at the start of May, according to Neil Grace, an agency spokesman. The case is now with the agency’s enforcement bureau. Grace could not say whether a referral to the bureau means a penalty will be implemented. Because the unauthorized launch is a first, it’s not clear what the punishment would be. Spangelo, a former systems engineer at Google and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, did not respond to calls or emails. Neither did others employed by or associated with Swarm, according to the company’s website and public documents.

Space may be the final frontier, but it’s by no means a lawless one. Space is a largely peaceful area because nations have agreed, whether in treaties or through unspoken norms, to play by a shared set of rules. Transparency is paramount, even in some cases of military or national-security missions. For a private company to launch satellites into low-Earth orbit without approval from its government flouts the framework that makes an extremely dangerous environment a fairly safe place to be.

In the last few years, the rate of launches of miniature satellites has increased exponentially. The industry is “moving away from these really large satellites that are expensive to build, expensive to launch, and into satellites that are highly specialized and often intended to last,” says Lisa Ruth Rand, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies the environmental history of near-Earth space. “The smaller the satellite, the cheaper it is to launch, the better rate a company will get.”