- March 22, 2024
- Posted by: admin
- Category: Emilio Cozzi
Miniaturization, weight and volume reduction, and cost-effective launch solutions are making space technologies accessible to startups, research institutions, and emerging countries. The increasing demand for satellite services al so plays a significant role, driving investor interest.
DI EMILIO COZZI
A fitting example is that of mobile phones, which only much later after their appearance became “smartphones”. The first mobile phone call, in fact, dates back almost eighty years: on June 17, 1946, Southwestern Bell, one of AT&T’s local companies, tested in Saint Louis, Missouri, a technology then weighing 36 kilograms and with a volume equal to that of a car trunk. Progress in telephony was slow. The first proper cell phones entered the market in the early 1970s. But they accelerated in the last decades, fitting devices capable of calling and video calling into everyone’s pockets, with apps that do almost everything and with computing and memory capacity that, according to the well-known comparison, surpasses the onboard computer that took Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the Moon.
A relevant comparison, considering that the next lines will delve into space and how technological progress has made access to orbit much more affordable.
However, if the significant step toward this “democratization” is mainly due to the steep fall in the cost per kilogram to launch one’s payload into orbit, the reasoning requires a step back, inside the factories where satellites are built.
Detailing every category of satellite and the shift towards miniaturization would require the space of a small encyclopedia. Let’s start, then, with a simple fact: 2023 is the year with the most payloads launched. In total, almost 2,900, according to the meticulous statistics compiled by astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell. Over two thousand are from the Starlink constellation alone. They too constitute an important part of this complex discourse. Bryce Technology, in its annual report (the latest available is from 2022, also a record year, with around 2,500 satellites deployed), estimates that 96% were small satellites, weighing between a few kilograms and six quintals. The range is wide, but consider that before the new space economy, satellites were mostly machines as large as an SUV and equally heavy, with costs reaching tens or hundreds of millions of euros. And perhaps, precisely because on Earth everything was moving in that direction, starting from phones and computers that, as they reduced in size, increased in computing capacity, satellites could not but follow the same path.
For decades, the space industry relied on expensive components, specially designed and “certified” for space. Components that were – and still are, when it comes to cutting-edge technology or special needs, such as missions to the Moon or experimental probes – produced in small batches with little or no economy of scale. What has changed, in step with the interest in the space economy and in a virtuous circle that has fed itself, is standardization and commercial off-the-shelf technologies, sourced from the market and not developed ad hoc. The abundance of use has acted on economies of scale, making small satellite components more accessible and benefiting from miniaturization, increasing performance, and the production dynamics of smartphones and other mass technologies.
In a short time, we have arrived at satellites with very high performance, as large as a washing machine or a microwave oven; then there are cubesats, cubes with sides of a few centimeters, comfortably housing a high-resolution camera, a processor, an antenna, and a battery, covered with small solar panels (whose cost has plummeted in recent years). Various factors have played a role in the process, ready to influence each other. Miniaturization has indeed reduced the costs, volume, and weight of the equipment. This is not a minor detail, especially when considering launch prices per kilogram (which have also plummeted, as the following lines will reiterate). De facto, the off-the-shelf component – literally, buying standard components “off the shelf,” even if not validated for extra-atmospheric use – has allowed huge savings in terms of development. This last point can weigh heavily in terms of time and resources.
The result is that current prices, for the cheapest cubesats, can amount to a few thousand dollars.
The life expectancy
The other side of the coin is reliability: smaller satellites, using components not designed and validated for space or for a specific mission, with less performant materials, and still without the typical redundancy of systems (batteries, circuits, processors, and onboard computers) capable of dealing with a malfunction with “reserve” solutions, have a lower average “life expectancy”. In this case, the choice is conditioned by the importance of the task. While on one hand, it means that devices in orbit will have, on average, lower performance and durability, on the other hand, these solutions have enabled access beyond the atmosphere for universities, research centers, emerging nations in the space sector, and startups.
Emphasis on the latter is mandatory. Simply because it is truly another world now. Small and medium-sized enterprises can afford to design and build smallsats and raise millions to implement their business plan without going through what until a few years ago would have been a double bottleneck: public investment in the idea and the availability of a launcher to ferry it beyond the sky. The space investment market has expanded the first, and private competition in the launcher sector the second. In Europe alone, according to a report from the European Space Agency, in 2022, the threshold of one billion investments in this sector was surpassed. In other words, trust and market are not lacking.
There are illustrious examples like Iceye, a Finnish company that has built a private constellation of “microsatellites” (below 100 kilograms) with synthetic aperture radar, the first so small to carry strategic technology for territorial monitoring.
Despite the drawbacks, for low-cost satellites, an Italian company, which is now impossible to call a startup, Argotec, has developed a probe model (the platform is called Hawk) that has operated in two NASA missions in deep space. It acted as an “eyewitness”, capturing the operations of the Artemis I mission and the Space Launch System carrier, and witnessed the impact of the Dart probe on the asteroid Dimorphos, chosen for a planetary defense test. All thanks to a parallelepiped the size of a boot box.
It is not excluded, and indeed predictable, that Argotec will soon inaugurate serial production. And this will lower costs. Just as it brutally lowers costs, SpaceX, which churns out over a hundred Starlink satellites every month. And which, in the meantime, launches just as many. Starlink satellites weigh a few quintals (those of the new generation should be much heavier); economies of scale, in this case, express their full potential. And the already mentioned low average lifespan of smallsats means that Starlink satellites are continuously “decommissioned” and replaced to grow and maintain an orbital network composed of thousands of devices. It’s not a disposable technology, but it resembles it a lot.
Another factor to consider remains: the trust that, for several years now, permeates the market. Trust that, although fluctuating, is expressed in billions of dollars globally: 15.3 in 2021, 9.3 in 2022, and 12.5 last year. The driving sector remains that of communications and telecommunications, which account for 84% of satellite manufacturing and services