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The CubeSat projects at Cal Poly and Stanford I think are what led to lowering costs and allowing the launch of riskier hardware and spawned this corner of the
by digikata 8y ago
The CubeSat projects at Cal Poly and Stanford I think are what led to lowering costs and allowing the launch of riskier hardware and spawned this corner of the space industry. Planet was definitely one of the first to have the vision to commercialize that capability.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CubeSat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CubeSat
- kartikkumar 8y agoSure, the CubeSat standard was a big breakthrough of course. Bob Twiggs & Jordi Puig-Suari really helped to push forward the idea of standardization as a path towards reducing costs, but it was primarily intended as a learning platform for grad students. I kinda draw the analogy of how the Raspberry Pi went from being a learning tool, to something that hackers/makers saw as an opportunity to innovate on. CubeSats went through a similar transition. The work that then led to commercial activities came from a lot of different people have similar ideas about how commoditization can help to reduce costs and allow for riskier projects. There's actually a strong bias in the media that doesn't reflect the diversity of projects, missions, and technologies on the market at the moment. The idea of using a platform like CubeSats to open up the space sector is a lot more widespread than I think more people are aware of.