Reaching for the stars on a shoestring
Change was in the air at the recent Space Symposium in Colorado Springs.
Suspended from the ceiling, the exhibits showed scaled-down models of the manufacturers’ vast, multi- ton satellites. But some items required no reduction.
The main body of the SN- 50 Nanosat on Sierra Nevada Corp.’s stand was only 40 centimeters (cm) by 40 cm.
Booz Allen Hamilton, the consultancy, displayed a satellite featuring two antennas sprouting from a 10-cm cube.
These tiny satellites testify how the miniaturization that has transformed consumer electronics over the past decade has begun to reshape the once forbiddingly expensive business of putting a satellite into space.
The field has been particularly transformed by the invention in 1999 of the CubeSat — 10 cm boxes such as the one on the Booz Allen Hamilton stand — which can be joined together to make larger devices, depending on requirements.
The size and cost revolution, which has slashed the price of some satellite capabilities from tens of millions of dollars to tens of thousands, is encouraging start- up companies to launch niche, satellite- based enterprises.
For business users, there are companies that specialize in judging from space how full oil tanks in critical oil storage facilities are and others that estimate how good a harvest certain agricultural areas will produce. Consumers stand to benefit from services that will provide internet access in remote areas or feed live images to street- mapping services.
There were 191 satellites between 1 kilogram ( kg) and 100 kg launched in 2014, according to Northern Sky Research, an industry analyst. That figure represented a 95% increase over the 98 launched in 2013 and compares with just 22 as recently as 2011. While Northern Sky expects a dip in activity this year — to 153 — it expects well over 200 launches in 2016.
Peter Beck, chief executive of Rocket Lab, a New Zealandbased company that aims to build a small rocket to serve the market, says electronics, power and location-finding equipment have all matured extraordinarily.
“The optics, the software — everything is good enough that you can be commercial from a small size,” Mr. Beck says.
Yet, the transformation has ramifications beyond the niche for high- technology start- ups. Some of the established market for far bigger satellites — many of which use geostationary orbits, 36,000 kilometers ( km) above a fixed point on earth — could shift to using big constellations of smaller satellites. These smaller constellations often orbit only about 300 km above the earth’s surface, meaning they are far cheaper and easier to launch.
“Everyone is thinking about small now,” says George Whitesides, chief executive of Virgin Galactic, Sir Richard Branson’s space operator.
Virgin Galactic is building a launcher — known as Launcher One — to carry payloads of 225 kg or less to low-earth orbit.
“Over the next two, five, 10 years, you’ll see a tremendous amount of activity in this area,” Mr. Whitesides says.
Northern Sky is projecting a dip in launches this year partly because many operators launched constellations of satellites in 2013 and 2014 with lifespans of between 18 months and two years. Replacements will be launched in 2016.
“Five years is the technology cycle,” Mr. Beck says. “You have to keep pace with everything on the ground.”
Advances in terrestrial computing and satellites’ ability to communicate with one another have helped to enhance small satellites’ usefulness. Images gathered from vast numbers of small satellites can provide almost as good a picture of the earth’s surface as the pictures from a single orbiting behemoth.
Planet Labs, a United Statesbased earth imaging start-up that completed a $118-million funding round a fortnight ago, is in the course of launching more than 100 small satellites to take pictures of earth.
OneWeb, part of the United Kingdom’s Virgin Group, plans a constellation of nearly 700 satellites of 130 kg to provide Internet services to underserved areas.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX is also planning to launch more than 4,000 small satellites for a similar project, probably in collaboration with Google, which has invested $100 million in SpaceX.
Yet, while small satellites are the industry’s fastest- growing area, they look unlikely to eradicate other types immediately.
The average size of the biggest geostationary satellites — driven by rising demand for communications bandwidth — is also increasing, Mr. Beck points out. The US’ Federal Aviation Administration forecasts that demand to launch the very heaviest satellites — weighing more than 5,400 kg — will hold steady until at least 2017, at an average of 9.7 launches a year.
Frank Culbertson, president of the Space Systems Group of Orbital ATK, the aerospace and military group, says his company will continue to offer different launch vehicles to suit different types of satellites.
“You need a mix of all the different sizes to meet the need,” Mr. Culbertson says.