What Does the Smallsat of the Future Look Like?

Small satellite companies that have grown out of the New Space boom are retiring the cubesat platforms that made them to focus on larger, more powerful next-get small sats that promise to unlock new possibilities with advanced AI and real-time laser-based inter-satellite communications.

Over the past 15 years, small satellites have revolutionized how things are done in space. Built quickly from cheap, off-the-shelf components, and small enough to hitch an affordable ride to orbit on the back of bigger missions, these devices and the young, agile New Space companies behind them taught the old-school space industry a few lessons.

But New Space is coming of age and the firms behind the small satellite revolution must live up to expectations less favorable to their trade-mark experimental ethos. The lowest cost and shortest time to orbit may no longer be the technology’s biggest draw as users want maximum return on investment and require granted reliability. The firms behind the disruptive tech, however, have grown up together with their market share and are tapping into emerging innovation, looking to unleash a whole load of new applications in the coming years.

The Evolution of the Smallsat

Satellites started small. The first U.S. satellite, Explorer 1 — launched in 1958 — weighed only 13 kilograms. But the technology, prized for opening a whole new perspective on our planet, quickly bulked up, enabled by the increasing lifting powers of fast-evolving rockets. Soon, complex satellites the size of a school bus took over, observing the planet from above, broadcasting TV signals across continents and sensing the environment around them.

It was only in the mid-1980s that researchers renewed their interest in smaller satellites with masses of tens to a couple of hundred kilograms. The true small sat revolution, however, began in 1999, with the invention of a cubesat. Based on standardized satellite units of 10 by 10 by 10 centimeters in size, cubesats opened space to anyone with enough technical skill to assemble and operate them. Soon, university teams from all over the world began launching their own experimental spacecraft to provide their students with hands-on space tech experience.

By 2014, San Francisco-based Planet Labs launched its first commercial constellation of 28 three-unit (3U) Earth-observing cubesats called Doves. More than 120 Doves are in orbit today, capturing an image of each place on Earth more than once a day. Other companies followed suit. As of today, cubesats have made it to orbit around Mars and the Moon and observed the impact of NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) into the asteroid Didymos in 2022 in real-time.

Larger small satellite platforms — up to 500 kg in mass — have also grown in popularity. In fact, these larger small satellites today dominate space around Earth thanks to SpaceX’s constellation of Starlink internet-beaming satellites.

Consulting firm Novaspace predicts that 26,104 small satellites — including minisatellites of 100 to 500 kg in mass, microsatellites between 10 and 100 kg and nanosatellites as light as 1 to 10 kg — will launch in the next decade.

And although the smallsat revolution is already behind us, new technologies are emerging that promise to supercharge the sector in the coming years. Via Satellite spoke with a number of experts in the field about what the smallsat of the future will look like.

An AI-Powered Future

“The main paradigm shift is going to be edge computing,” Viktor Danchev, CTO of Bulgaria-based EnduroSat tells Via Satellite. “It’s going to change in orders of magnitude the capability of those satellites and enable them to become not just data collectors, but decision-makers.”

Edge computing, the distributed approach to computing that focuses on data processing at the source rather than at remote data centers, will enable satellites to analyze images and measurements on-board instead of downlinking them to the ground during sparse passes over ground stations. The technology hasn’t yet fully taken off in space due to doubts about the ability of cutting-edge computers to survive in the harsh environment of space where temperatures range from minus 65 to 125 degrees Celsius and where charged particles create high levels of radiation that can harm electronics.

But the potential uses of AI in space are many. Apart from being able to understand unsupervised which images are the most relevant for which users, artificially intelligent satellites will be able to dodge debris autonomously, analyze faults and telemetry data and operate with little human oversight.

New Space companies like EnduroSat, in line with their experimental ethos, are not afraid of using processors that have not been hardened for space and are developing software and hardware hacks to make off-the-shelf computers more resilient.

“We want to have capabilities in orbit, which are closer to what users are used to on the ground,” says Danchev. “For example, being able to include acceleration hardware like FPGAs [field programmable gate arrays] and GPUs [graphics processing units] on board and being able to really perform edge computing at scale.”

The company built an experimental satellite for IBM, called Platform 1, that has been testing AI algorithms for in-orbit Earth-observation image processing since 2022.

EnduroSat uses a modular, software-defined satellite architecture that can be reprogrammed in orbit, which Danchev compares to the way modern Apple devices communicate with each other within a connected system.

“From the power system to the control system, the entire satellite is like a network of different components that is decentralized, and everything is talking to everything else,” says Danchev.

EnduroSat envisions that end users should be able to use satellites without any specialist training, just like they would use a new Apple Mac or iPhone.

The company has come a long way since 2015 when it was founded as a spin-off from a space tech challenge in Bulgaria. The firm’s first spacecraft, the 1 kilogram 1U EnduroSat 1, flew to space in 2018. It carried an amateur radio payload that enabled engineering students across Bulgaria to experiment with satellite communications. Now EnduroSat offers a range of satellite platforms up to the size of a 70 kg ESPA-class satellite bus.

The company is currently building the TOLIMAN space telescope for the University of Sydney that will map orbital motions of stars that make up the Alpha Centauri star system, the closest stellar neighbors of our Sun. The mission, hosted on a 16U cubesat platform 20 by 40 cm in size represents a breakthrough not just for EnduroSat but for the entire small sat sector as it will be able to monitor the two stars located some 4.2 light-years away with a precision previously achieved only by large government-paid space telescope.

Optical Fiber in Orbit

Tokyo-based Axelspace expects that in addition to in-space AI, inter-satellite laser communication links will open a new realm of satellite applications from Low Earth Orbit (LEO). The company, founded in 2008 by Tokyo University engineering graduate Yuya Nakamura, won a contract from Japan’s New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO) last year to develop an inter-satellite optical communications system that could become part of Japan’s future 6G telecommunications infrastructure. The company plans for the constellation to be up and running by 2030.

“Inter-satellite communication technology will be a game changer in the space industry,” Nakamura told Via Satellite. “It will be like having an optical fiber in orbit. It will enable us to communicate with every satellite in real time, which will create innovative applications.”

Providing high data throughput rates of more than 10 Gbps and speed-of-light data exchange, a constellation of LEO satellites will communicate with a ground station in real time via a relay satellite in Geostationary Orbit (GEO).

The technology, in combination with in-orbit data processing using AI, will make critical insights available to users on Earth as soon as images are taken. Nakamura says the system will also boost national security and defense, allowing satellites to be tasked in real time using the optical links that are almost impossible to jam and intercept.

“Now, we need to wait until the satellite comes above the ground station,” Nakamura says. “It can take 30 minutes to an hour. But with optical inter-satellite links, we could send direct commands to satellites in real time.”

Axelspace launched its first satellite, the 10 kg WNISAT 1, the world’s first commercial weather satellite, in 2013. Since then, the company put into orbit nine satellites including five spacecraft of the GRUS Earth-observation constellation. Like EnduroSat, Axelspace’s devices have also grown in size since the company’s early days. Each of the GRUS spacecraft weighs 100 kg.

Nakamura thinks that with the fast-growing quantity of satellites in orbit, sustainability of operations will have to become a main consideration behind satellite development. With that in mind, Axelspace developed what the company calls the “green spacecraft standard” — a set of guidelines and manufacturing practices designed to reduce the environmental impacts of space utilization in orbit as well as on Earth.

In addition to more efficient thrusters that enable more responsive collision avoidance, Axelspace has also begun to fit its satellites with deorbiting sails that deploy at the end of the mission to speed up the satellites’ re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere. The company launched its first satellite fitted with the technology, the Pyxis mission, in March this year.

A Push for More Reliability

Arnoldas Pečiukevičius, director of product and mission development at Lithuania-headquartered Kongsberg NanoAvionics, also expects small satellites to continue getting bigger. The company, which recently announced it had completed full standardization of its micro and nano satellite buses, started in 2014 as a spin-off from Vilnius University. Its first mission, the 1U LituanicaSAT-1 fitted with an amateur radio payload (just like EnduroSat 1), launched the same year. But Pečiukevičius tells Via Satellite the company’s smallest satellite bus currently on offer is the 6U Nanosatellite M6P.

“The 3U satellite is no longer in our portfolio because we saw that there are quite a lot of limitations to these small platforms and no need for them in the commercial and defense sector,” says Pečiukevičius. “The volume of the payload is limited; the data transfer rates are very limited and so is the pointing accuracy.”

A big factor that will continue to favor larger small sats is the decreasing cost of launch, a trend that is expected to accelerate once SpaceX’s mega-rocket Starship enters service, Pečiukevičius says.

The company has expanded to ESPA-class MP42. NanoAvionics launched its largest-ever satellite in March 2024 at 120 kg for an unnamed customer, and offers satellites up to 200 kg in mass.

“The ongoing advancements and innovations in miniaturization and the lower cost of launch allow for more sophisticated payloads again,” says Pečiukevičius. “But with more sophisticated payloads, you have higher thermal and energy requirements and that means you need a larger satellite. So that sort of wild advantage of making things smaller and cheaper is lost and you end up making things bigger again.”

Pečiukevičius expects that the small satellite sector as a whole is going to shift toward larger platforms of 150 to 250 kg with most future cubesat purchasers looking at the larger 16U platforms.

NanoAvionics may be a textbook example of a company that emerged from the New Space era, but Pečiukevičius thinks the New Space way of doing things has run its course. Small, quick and cheap usually doesn’t mean reliable, he says, and New Space companies must adjust their attitude.

“It's nice and fun to make satellites in the New Space way,” he says. “It's quite quick. But if you want to be a real business, you need to enable the potential of space for the user. In order to enable the potential of space for the user, you need to have a good, reliable product.”

From EO to Telecommunications and Beyond

Small satellites rose to prominence in Earth observation. With the emergence of SpaceX’s Starlink megaconstellation, they began to take over telecommunications as well.

“I don’t think that Ukraine today would still be a country if it weren’t for Starlink,” says Mike Kaplan, vice president of business development at Leostella, based in Washington state in the U.S. “Starlink is a good example of a capability that a Low-Earth-Orbit small satellite can provide that just no one else can provide.”

LeoStella, a joint venture between Thales Alenia Space and Earth-observation intelligence company BlackSky, was founded in 2018. Since then, the firm has manufactured tens of satellites for BlackSky, Loft Orbital, NorthStar, and others.

Kaplan, who in the 1990s led the NASA team developing the James Webb Space Telescope concept, thinks that small satellites are set to expand beyond Low Earth Orbit and master new kinds of applications, including radar remote sensing.

“Low-Earth Orbit was sort of the entrance point to the market,” Kaplan says. “But there certainly is interest in Medium-Earth Orbit, where the U.S. Department of Defense has jumped out with a couple of opportunities.”

Advances in technology development fuel the smallsat expansion beyond LEO, making the technology an enticing alternative to larger missions even for government and defense customers requiring high reliability.

“The combination of additional performance capability and really affordable prices means that not just for commercial but also for government missions, business cases and use cases get closed much more easily,” says Kaplan. “We’re seeing that missions that traditionally had been considered high-powered and not suitable for small satellites can now actually be done by small satellites.”

Kaplan expects LEO to remain the largest market for small satellites but sees potential for expansion to MEO, GEO, and lunar orbit.

“I don’t expect the same kind of explosive growth that we have seen in Low-Earth Orbit,” he says. “There is some demand for communications applications in GEO, but also for space situational awareness. And there will certainly be opportunities for small satellite platforms to operate in cis-lunar space. Once you have a more permanent presence on the moon, which is expected to happen in the 2030s, you’d need a communications network around the moon, a navigation system to help you maneuver around the moon and all these missions can be most cost-effectively performed by a small satellite platform.”

Smallsat leaders expect the upcoming “golden age of constellations” to keep them busy in the coming years and hope that the smallsat technology, traditionally launched to LEO, will find more and more uses further away from the planet. From spy satellites monitoring the motions in the Geostationary ring, to data relay and navigational satellites around the Moon and Mars, small satellites will undertake increasingly sophisticated missions. The advent of space robotics, active debris removal, in-orbit servicing and manufacturing will open yet another realm of opportunities. VS

Editor's note: Information about NanoAvionics MP42 has been updated.

Tereza Pultarova is a freelance space and scitech journalist