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So what is the market for small satellites? Is it just the companies that have existing (big) satellites needing to replace them? And now with miniaturization,

So what is the market for small satellites? Is it just the companies that have existing (big) satellites needing to replace them? And now with miniaturization, it's possible to replace them with smaller, cheaper-to-launch versions? Or is this meant to provide alternatives for other sectors? If I wanted to build a new cell phone network, would it be potentially cheaper to launch a bunch of small satellites than build out the ground infrastructure (towers)? Even though a satellite in LEO is significantly farther away than the average cellphone tower, would it work because line-of-sight is improved?

ep103 12y ago
Last time I checked (5 years ago), small satellites were a _booming_ industry, but also a very amateur / research oriented one. While a professional military or communications organization may launch a number of small satellites, they tend to go through the same process as when they're building a large one. As such, most of the small sat world is focused on amateurs launching small satellites of their own design, student organizations and startups launching 1U type boxes, and research efforts for which a tiny box is sufficient. As for your second question, a few points: 1) yes, it is massively cheaper to give your nation cell coverage via satellite as opposed to via tower. There have been a number of success stories in Africa where a local government / business managed to put together the funds to buy a communications satellite, and overnight, the entire country has cell phones. 2) No, you wouldn't do this via a small sat, you'd need a real deal communications satellite to achieve this. One of the key features of small sats is that they are small enough that if you beg and plead enough to the powers that be, you might find room on a launch vehicle to launch your tiny satellite in some spare room. If this service can open that up to people who don't have governmental / educational connections, all the better. 3) There is research on creating swarms of small satellites that can communicate and act like one giant one. That's pretty cool. I worked with these guys http://www.spacecraftresearch.com/blog/?page_id=260 http://www.spacecraftresearch.com/blog/?page_id=260 for a time, and they were working on setting up satellites that were so small, they couldn't even fit a real antenna on them, but figuring out basically a radio based encoding pattern so that you could pull their signal out from beneath the noise floor anyway. That all said, the industry is dominated that way because of the difficulty of launching a satellite to begin with. If you can make it easier to launch sats of any type, then people will start building those too. Build it, and they will come.
- seanflyon 12y ago
  Small satellites in this context are up to 400kg so they can be a couple orders of magnitude larger than a 1U cubesat
- grkvlt 12y ago
  > There have been a number of success stories in Africa where a local government / business managed to put together the funds to buy a communications satellite, and overnight, the entire country has cell phones. Really? That doesn't seem likely at all. You can either put the satellites in LEO and you need a hugely expensive constellation, or in GEO and you need a dish not a mobile phone. The best use case for satellite is probably backhaul, rather than cell tower replacement.
grkvlt 12y ago
> Even though a satellite in LEO is significantly farther away than the average cellphone tower, would it work because line-of-sight is improved? No, because you need loads of the things. They don't just hover overhead a few hundred km up, they orbit once every couple of hours. And if you want one to remain within that distance, you need a bunch in completely different orbits, launched at different times, to maintain coverage. Iridium took almost 80 satellites at 800km up, for instance. The higher up you go, the less satellites you need, but the bigger the handset gets, and speed-of-light delay becomes an annoyance.

ep103 12y ago

Last time I checked (5 years ago), small satellites were a _booming_ industry, but also a very amateur / research oriented one. While a professional military or communications organization may launch a number of small satellites, they tend to go through the same process as when they're building a large one. As such, most of the small sat world is focused on amateurs launching small satellites of their own design, student organizations and startups launching 1U type boxes, and research efforts for which a tiny box is sufficient. As for your second question, a few points: 1) yes, it is massively cheaper to give your nation cell coverage via satellite as opposed to via tower. There have been a number of success stories in Africa where a local government / business managed to put together the funds to buy a communications satellite, and overnight, the entire country has cell phones. 2) No, you wouldn't do this via a small sat, you'd need a real deal communications satellite to achieve this. One of the key features of small sats is that they are small enough that if you beg and plead enough to the powers that be, you might find room on a launch vehicle to launch your tiny satellite in some spare room. If this service can open that up to people who don't have governmental / educational connections, all the better. 3) There is research on creating swarms of small satellites that can communicate and act like one giant one. That's pretty cool. I worked with these guys http://www.spacecraftresearch.com/blog/?page_id=260 http://www.spacecraftresearch.com/blog/?page_id=260 for a time, and they were working on setting up satellites that were so small, they couldn't even fit a real antenna on them, but figuring out basically a radio based encoding pattern so that you could pull their signal out from beneath the noise floor anyway. That all said, the industry is dominated that way because of the difficulty of launching a satellite to begin with. If you can make it easier to launch sats of any type, then people will start building those too. Build it, and they will come.

seanflyon 12y ago
Small satellites in this context are up to 400kg so they can be a couple orders of magnitude larger than a 1U cubesat
grkvlt 12y ago
> There have been a number of success stories in Africa where a local government / business managed to put together the funds to buy a communications satellite, and overnight, the entire country has cell phones. Really? That doesn't seem likely at all. You can either put the satellites in LEO and you need a hugely expensive constellation, or in GEO and you need a dish not a mobile phone. The best use case for satellite is probably backhaul, rather than cell tower replacement.

grkvlt 12y ago

> Even though a satellite in LEO is significantly farther away than the average cellphone tower, would it work because line-of-sight is improved? No, because you need loads of the things. They don't just hover overhead a few hundred km up, they orbit once every couple of hours. And if you want one to remain within that distance, you need a bunch in completely different orbits, launched at different times, to maintain coverage. Iridium took almost 80 satellites at 800km up, for instance. The higher up you go, the less satellites you need, but the bigger the handset gets, and speed-of-light delay becomes an annoyance.