An exciting achievement for Spangelo became an unprecedented event in American history. As far as anyone can remember, the launch of the SpaceBees marked the first time a U.S. company had sent a commercial satellite into orbit without permission from federal regulators.

The mystery of the SpaceBees just got even weirder.

The FCC ordered Swarm to cease any transmissions between the satellites and the company’s ground stations on Earth, and opened an investigation into the launch. The company that helped broker Swarm’s ticket on the Indian rocket system said it wouldn’t have done it if they had known Swarm lacked the proper approval. The unauthorized launch prompted questions about the future of satellite regulation and legislation, and reignited discussion about chronic concerns over the growing number of objects in low-Earth orbit.

For Spangelo, the launch wasn’t supposed to happen this way.

“You know, looking back, I definitely am regretful and I view it as a mistake,” Spangelo told me in a recent interview. “I feel terrible for the confusion and the additional regulation that we may see come. It’s a very difficult situation, and we’ve done everything we can to resolve the issues to move forward positively.”

Spangelo is a former systems engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Google. She has a doctorate in aerospace engineering from the University of Michigan and last year participated in astronaut training in Canada, where she was born. She founded Swarm in Palo Alto, California, in 2016.

Through Swarm, Spangelo sought to develop and launch a constellation of at least 100 small satellites. The satellites would form a communications network that would allow internet-connected devices, from tiny sensors to mobile phones, to talk to one another back on Earth. For example, a rural farmer with an internet-connected phone could use the network to receive data from devices placed in crop fields.

In April 2017, Swarm submitted an application to the FCC for a launch license for the satellites that would test this mission: the SpaceBEEs—“Space” for space, “BEEs” for basic electronic elements. The SpaceBEEs look like thick coasters; each measures 10 centimeters in length and width, and 2.8 centimeters in height. The document outlined the proposed satellites’ design and operations, as well as Swarm’s plans to launch them using the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle, India’s rocket-launch system.

In December 2017, the FCC responded with a denial. The agency said the SpaceBees would be too small to be tracked reliably by the U.S. Space Surveillance Network, a military-operated system that catalogs all artificial objects orbiting Earth. Officials seemed to believe this would create a dangerous situation, in which satellite operators might be unable to anticipate and avoid collisions with the SpaceBees. “We cannot conclude that a grant of this application is in the public interest,” wrote Anthony Serafini, the FCC’s experimental-licensing-branch chief, in the rejection notice.