
Small satellites are radically remaking space exploration - rbanffy
https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/07/how-small-satellites-are-radically-remaking-space-exploration/
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simonh
I'm also really excited by the opportunities low cost access to space and
standardised low cost probes offer, but there is still a vital role for the
big budget flagship missions.

The article imagines what we could do with 100 mini Curiosity rovers, but the
reality is not much. A rover is a completely different proposition from a
cubesat. The instruments Curiosity carried can't just be scaled down 100
times. Similarly if we're going to put a lander on Europa, there's a minimum
size such a thing would need to be to work at all, be able to carry useful
instruments and have enough power to transmit data back, and it's not tiny.

The fact is you build the probe and mission around the instruments you want to
send, and that sets quite high minimum vehicle design parameters for many
missions. The MarCO cubesats barely carried any instruments at all, they were
mainly communications relays for the InSight probe. On their own they could do
practically no science. Yes I know they were mainly a demo mission, but lets
keep things in proportion. Add more instruments and you need more power so
bigger solar panels, more powerful computers, more capable antennas, bigger
batteries, more powerful thrusters, a bigger launcher and all of a sudden it's
not a cubesat any more.

So I do apologies for pouring all that cold water. The stuff is really
exciting and is genuinely opening up new and exciting opportunities, but let's
not kid ourselves that the old way of doing things is over. It really isn't.
If these new technologies created the impression that flagship missions are a
waste of money and not worth doing, it would be a terrible shame. This isn't
an SLS vs Starship type contest where one solution essentially deprecates the
other. Micro-missions are a fantastic complement to traditional exploration
models, but not a replacement.

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keanebean86
What about a cubesat solar system relay system? Each with a few directional
antennas pointed at the nearest neighbor in the grid. Maybe offset from the
solar system plane to avoid impacts. It would take a few billion sats to
blanket the whole solar system but they're cheap. If we built them in space we
could have spares all over waiting to fill gaps.

I tried to do the math but failed. Pluto's orbital diameter, according to
wikipedia, is about 4.4 billion km. That means the main solar system has a
circumference of about 27 billion km. Starlink cubesats orbit at about 550km.
Relay sats wouldn't need to punch through atmosphere so they could be farther
apart.

I pictured a series of circles. The close to the sun the smaller. I'm sure if
I'd listened in cal 1 I could use a summation to figure this out.

Losing a few sats periodically isn't a big deal and it won't bring down the
whole network.

It might slow signals down to propagate through the mesh but communication is
already slow in space. If a probe/ship needs to communicate quickly it can use
its own high power dish or laser.

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kartikkumar
Eric Berger has a lot of really great stories about what's going on in the
space industry. Smallsats have been the story of the sector for going on two
decades now.

I've got a background in both space engineering and planetary science. One of
the most exciting things that I see happening over the coming decade is
commoditization of planetary probes. There's so much more of the Solar System
that we still have to explore and the traditional flagship missions just don't
give us enough access.

The best way to think of how smallsats augment our space science and
exploration capability is in terms of the marginal value over traditional
missions. For planetary science, the cost per bit of science data can
drastically be reduced through the use of Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS)
components.

There are a number of private companies looking to leveraging smallsats to
deliver all-in planetary science missions, like Xplore [1].

As a space engineer, access to suppliers was really a major hurdle towards
finding the optimal cost and risk sweet spot. If you're interested, we've
published a series of articles shedding light on different products & services
available on the market [2]. We've now got 1000s of space engineers every
month from all over the world using these articles to drive better sourcing.

Better sourcing will ultimately lead to better missions, and drive the
smallsat revolution towards completely remaking the way we think of both space
science and exploration.

[1] [https://www.xplore.com](https://www.xplore.com)

[2] [https://blog.satsearch.co/2019-12-03-space-technology-on-
sat...](https://blog.satsearch.co/2019-12-03-space-technology-on-satsearch).

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d_silin
Shamelessly pitching our own small satellite project that can run mission of
_your_ choice:

[https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/exodusorbitals/nova-
a-c...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/exodusorbitals/nova-a-crowd-
flyable-space-mission/)

~~~
6nf
Looks interesting! I see you have plans for a camera. I've previously looked
into this and I know that camera hardware needs to be cleared by some
government authorities and there may be some limitations due to security
concerns or something?

Could you expand on this? What are the limitations and regulations on cameras
in space for civilian sats?

~~~
d_silin
Well, the answer is kind of long. We are going to have a meeting/workshop this
week with legal company that specializes in space law. Two major points clear
so far:

\- For our first mission camera resolution is not a big concern, we are not
launching KH-11 grade hardware.

\- However, there is list of specific locations that need to be blacklisted
for "national security considerations", depending on both of satellite
operator jurisdiction and satellite users' nationality as well.

It is going to be messy and complicated, but in the words of our legal
consultant: "difficult, but doable".

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bryanlarsen
Written by Eric Berger. I'm a big fan of his, you can read his other stories
at
[https://arstechnica.com/author/ericberger/](https://arstechnica.com/author/ericberger/)

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marianov
The development of some satellites is also radically faster and using COTS
software, like shell scripting, python, etc.

This is a talk by Satellogic Gerardo Richarte on how they hacked control back
of an orbiting satellite after a dev did an rm -rf / on a couple of it's
computers [https://youtu.be/B88AYaQNlD4](https://youtu.be/B88AYaQNlD4) It's in
spanish, but it's a great anecdote of "hackers in space"

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ShorsHammer
The smallsat market has to consolidate at some point. There's a lot of players
now.

If Spacex entered the market I think it would be game over but they seem
content to ignore it and focus on bigger payloads.

Last time I looked was blown away by the costs for a non-commercial 0.5U
tubesat launch. $12,000 including all the hardware:

[https://www.interorbital.com/Tubesat%20Kits](https://www.interorbital.com/Tubesat%20Kits)

~~~
CraftThatBlock
SpaceX does have a smallsat ride sharing program. The Starlink-8 launch was
the first one (with 2 smallsats from SkySat), and the upcoming Starlink-9 also
has 1 (BlackSky Global).

[https://www.spacex.com/rideshare/](https://www.spacex.com/rideshare/)

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ShorsHammer
I stand corrected.

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dustingetz
a

