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