Small satellites are a big trend. Drawn by lucrative business prospects, companies and capital around the world are fuelling a sort of smallsat rush. Whether smallsats are likely to deliver on their heady commercial promise remains to be seen. But they are disrupting markets and governments alike, and have emerged as one of the principal driving forces for democratizing the landscape of outer space activities.
Smallsats are not a novel phenomenon. By definition their size and weight matters, which provides links to their past and clues to their future. Generally included among their varieties are microsatellites (10-100 kg), nanosatellite (1-10 kg), and picosatellites (0.1-1 kg). CubeSats, a class of standardized nanosatellites (based on units of a 10 cm cube) draw attention for their nifty characteristics, and are useful comparators for thinking about bigger and smaller sizes. Depending on how you classify things the earliest satellites like Sputnik I (83.6 kg), Explorer I (13.9 kg), and Vanguard I (1.47 kg) fall under the rubric.
The newest “Chipsat” types in the femtosatellite class (10-100 g) are barely there, but could turn out to be transformative because of that scale. One example is the aptly named prototype Sprite, that is no bigger than a postage stamp but with power, sensor, and communication systems on a printed circuit board that can sail through the solar system like space dust.
Since Sputnik I, smallsats have loomed large in the intellectual and entrepreneurial imagination. Starting formally in 1987, public, private and university participants have been coming together in the world’s leading specialized Small Satellite Conference that gives some sense of long-standing interest in this area. Its earliest proceedings resonate in what we hear so commonly about smallsats today – enthusiastic developers, less mass, low costs, short production time frames, ingenious new possibilities.
It is the range of developers that takes us beyond just governments and the West. Universities have played a pivotal role in this process. Academics at Stanford and California Polytechnic State University helped develop the original concepts for CubeSat, for example. The University of Surrey showcased the development of cheaper and smaller satellites more rapidly with commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components. At the University of Washington the CubeSat Team in the Advanced Propulsion Lab is working on cutting-edge communication and propulsion, and at Cornell University the Space Systems Design Studio is experimenting with the possibilities of Sprites.
The same processes are at play in Asia, home to ambitious new players in space. In Japan, the Intelligent Space Systems Laboratory at the University of Tokyo is taking the country’s smallsats into newer terrains. In Singapore, the Satellite Research Center at Nanyang Technological University has moved to deepen its expertise in small satellites by establishing a research lab in partnership with Thales Solutions Asia and Europe’s largest satellite maker, Thales Alenia Space. India too is attempting to draw on the university-centered model. The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) has backed a non-profit organization, the Shanghai Engineering Center for Microsatellites as well as the CAS Joint Key Laboratory of Microsatellites.
The educational mission resonates in other regions. In Russia, for example, smallsats under the Space Scientific and Education Project of Lomonosov Moscow State University are being manufactured by Polyot, which identifies itself as a major aerospace enterprise. In Brazil, the Federal University of Santa Maria worked in partnership with the National Institute of Space Research to launch the country’s first nanosatellite. At the Cape Peninsula University of Technology in South Africa, and in collaboration with the national space agency, postgraduate students helped launch the country’s first CubeSat through a program in the cross-border French South African Institute of Technology.
But the worldwide game is no longer merely about the training of the next generation of students or the demonstration of technologies. The smallsat rush is about new and old companies on a quest for commercialization. And with reason based on rosy market projections. One by SpaceWorks, which monitors global satellite activities, says that 107 commercial nano/microsatellite (1-50 kg) were launched in 2014, and thousands of smallsats (101-500 kg) are projected for launch in the next 15 years.
These ventures have already seen multi-million and multi-billion dollar investments, signaling strong private sector interest across the world in, for example, earth observations and imaging. Startups like Dauria Aerospace and Sputnix are hailed as the first private Russian companies to launch smallsats in the so-called new space economy. And companies like Planet Labs, Skybox Imaging (bought out by Google), OneWeb, Space X, UrtheCast, and BlackSky are welcoming us to see our world as never before.
There is a dark side to democratization too. The seemingly unstoppable spread of smallsats raises concerns about privacy, debris, and military uses. Their marriage with big data analytics alerts us to the ethics of social surveillance. Their increasing numbers affect the likelihood of collisions that add to the problem of orbital debris. And the 2015 keynote address at the small satellites conference by none other than General John E. Hyten, Commander of U.S. Air Force Space Command, signals that military stakeholders are not disinterested players in the technology that is at the heart of the deadly counterspace race today. These are all avenues to watch as we rethink the possibilities of the emerging space order and its governance.
