Everyone is focused on the precipitous drop in launch costs, but the supply chain is really where the biggest opportunities now lie.
Many suppliers are struggling with finding the right balance between economies of scale, lead time, modularity/standardization, reliability, and (backwards) compatibility.
As industry volume increases, this should start straightening itself out. The challenge is that there's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem at the moment: there's a severe lack of transparency, meaning that commercial market forces are largely missing.
So greater transparency = greater competitiveness = better price/value ratio = faster, better, cheaper satellites
There's a massive, evolving body of work on space law and a lot more than meets the eye. This article doesn't really canvas the extent to which the community to working towards tackling the long-term issue of space sustainability.
Every IAC, there's a space moot court run by the International Institute of Space Law (IISL) [0]. This is an excellent opportunity for space law young professionals to engage in pressing issues like Space Traffic Management (STM).
The issue with space debris is much like the climate change challenge: it's serious and nuanced. A few years ago, I co-authored a paper on the applicability of the IADC's 25-year guideline ,mentioned in the article, for Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites [1] (happy to send anyone a copy of the full manuscript if interested).
I've also done some work on the technical side of Active Debris Removal (ADR), and published a paper on figuring out how to target solutions to the Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP) for multi-target missions using low-thrust transfer trajectories [2] (likewise, happy to share the full paper if interested).
I'm sharing this is to highlight that the problem of space debris is not trivial. I find that it's often trivialized in articles intended for a general audience, when the devil really is in the details.
For instance, the article misses the important topic of addressing object ownership. There are no salvage laws in place for space assets. What's more, the fundamental definition of what is considered "junk" is in the eye of the beholder. Russian rocket bodies are often cited, however what's missed is the fact that Russia continues indefinitely to retain full ownership of these objects: hence, you can't touch them even if you could safely and economically remove them, without Russia giving explicit consent. This speaks to how intractable space law actually is: it's a massively complex geo-political maze.
The article also fails to mention that despite space being big, we witnessed the effects of a collision back in 2009 [3]. I had the pleasure of grabbing a drink with TS Kelso, the genius behind CelesTrak, last week during the conference. Fact is that we're hampered on all side (technical, economic, legal, political) to deal with the space debris problem.
There's an idea being floated to develop a Space Sustainability Rating (SSR), recently announced at the World Economic Forum [4]. I'm currently working on an idea with one of the participants in the consortium (Prof. Moriba Jah at UT Austin). He's got this quote that he loves to use to describe the right approach to Space Situational Awareness (SSA): "to know it, you must measure it; to understand it, you must predict it!" To that end, we're looking at connecting our global space supply chain database [5] to the knowledge of the space debris population, to better assess risk and enable lawmakers to understand what needs to be regulated (disclaimer: I'm one of the co-founders at satsearch).
In short, this article only skims over a highly complex topic with many dimensions.
I'm one of the co-founders at satsearch [1], where we're working on fixing procurement in the space industry. We're constantly battling shitty datasheets.
As a space engineer, I found it infinitely frustrating to work with flyers that suppliers provide on their website, that also double-up as preliminary datasheets. They're messy, inconsistent, and subject to whatever the supplier thinks their buyer might want to know.
We wrote a blog article about the mess that exists in the space industry [2], and a follow-up about what we think can be done to improve this through Electronic Data Sheets (EDS) [3].
The EEE industry seems streets ahead in this regard, which is perhaps primarily down to strong commercialization and rapid growth of the market over the past 20 years. I think with companies like Octopart [4] making it patently obvious who does a good job of supporting engineers, it might also have pushed suppliers to improve their documentation.
I'm curious though about the consistent use of PDFs. I understand from a usability point of view that they're great for documents, but I would have imagined that the EEE industry would have started distributing "smart documents".
To give you an example, the AD datasheet in this article includes a number of high-res graphs: why has the sector not moved to the point where these graphs are interactive elements that you can zoom into, programmatically read off of, export data from, etc.? The way I look at it, a Juypter notebook or something similar would be an awesome way to share datasheet content, allowing much more interactivity.
Anyone with any thoughts as to why datasheets haven't progressed in that direction?
Hey folks, nice to see this article hit the frontpage. I'm one of the co-founders at satsearch. We're working on building more content like this to open up the space industry to more people.
After some initial feedback, we're already working to expanding this article. We've also published articles on small satellite thrusters [1] and reaction wheels [2]. We'll be publishing one on ground-station-as-a-service soon.
Would love your feedback/input on what you'd like to see next.
I think an article like this would benefit by including the specs for each of the coils, such as weight, winding material, number of turns, effective area, resistance, and inductance, as well as covering the differences between air cores and ferromagnetic cores. One of the biggest time sinks in selecting components like these is getting suppliers to give you data sheets and converting their specs into a comparable format.
That's exactly the direction we're heading towards :)
We've already noticed that suppliers are starting to open up their product data because of the value we can bring to them through our website.
Our long-term plan is indeed to structure data sheets, so that you can actually start comparing products without having to spend hours wading through PDFs docs.
We've soft-launched our API [1], which we're using to build tools like our Data Explorer [2], to help engineers navigate design choices much more easily. Under the hood, we're working with suppliers to convert their data sheets to a standardized format.
We'll work on trying to extend this article specifically with your feedback.
While it's a little basic, it might be good to go over the different small sat form factors? You could talk about the different launch possibilities and general issues with each different size class.
Thanks for the suggestion! We can definitely set up a couple of articles to touch on the different smallsat form factors on the market. Launch is also a really interesting part of the market to cover. I've added both to out roadmap, thanks!
I've thought of building a KSP integration with our database, so who knows, maybe we'll figure out a way that you can actually pull in real parts on the market into KSP in the near future ;)
Do you mean comms systems like transceivers, antenna, etc.? There's some really exciting stuff going on with phased arrays and optical comms at the moment. Software-Defined Radio (SDR) is also becoming an increasing important area of innovation for satellite comms.
Space tugs have been a topic of research for quite a while in the space community. A number of companies targeting the in-space space transport market over the last few years, e.g., [1][2]. There's also a recent YC alum targeting this [3].
Propulsion is itself a really hot topic in the NewSpace market the moment, ranging from tiny thrusters for precision attitude control of smallsats, to large systems for orbital transport. We recently published a review of smallsat thrusters, highlighting the rich spectrum of solutions being brought to market [4] (Disclaimer: I'm one of the co-founders at satsearch).
There's a lot of systems innovation that enabling fuel-efficient solutions to be developed. Particularly, there's a lot of progress being made on developing high-efficient electric propulsion. One of the trending areas is water-based propulsion, given that it's clean, non-toxic, storable, and also abundantly available in the Solar System [5].
With companies also look at building fuel depots to refuel spacecraft on orbit [6], there's a wide array of new solutions that are going to emerge for repeat use of tugs.
The traditional GEO market went through a massive dip last year [7], but there's renewed interest with the real prospect of small GEO missions materializing in the next 24 months. Another YC alum is targeting this market [8].
So in short, this is a really dynamic sector, going through a lot of changes at the moment. I'm eager to learn more about Epic, to see where they're carving a niche for themselves. Also, interesting to see YC's continuity in funding hardtech space startups.
There's actually strong synergy. There's a lot of spin-in and spin-out going on between space and non-space sectors.
COTS and general commodization of "discete units" (parts, subsystems, assemblies, etc.) is one of the biggest drivers for the commercialization of space. It's enabling people to move towards the use of advanced manufacturing techniques, cutting lead time and cost, and enabling batch production.
We see a lot of this happening through our website: https://satsearch.co. We're effectively building a B2B marketplace because of this specific change in the way supply chains are being architected.
Disclosure: I'm one of the co-founders at satsearch.
This is where SAR imagery comes into play [1]. There are a few SAR constellations online and being worked on that are shifting the discussion about what we can track [2][3].
2. People generally have a poor understanding of how vast space is. Congestion in specific low-Earth orbits is definitely a concern, but the devil is in the details. For instance, launching to Sun-Synchronous orbit (SSO) [1] above ~600 km is considered to pose significant risk to on-orbit assets, because of how many satellites are in SSO and the kinetic energy their carry, however to really assess the risk, you need to do a lot of detailed population studies (I've done some of this stuff). In a nutshell, launching more satellites can be generally considered to increase risk of on-orbit collision and fragmentation, but quantifying it requires a lot of maths and physics.
3. Yes! There's is extensive and on-going research on this topic. Most people know the Kessler Syndrome [2], but honestly space debris research goes a lot further than that. This review by J.-C. Liou is a great starting point: https://commons.erau.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1233&co...
[1] https://lacuna.space/technology