Small Satellites and Governmental Role in Development of New Technology, Services, and Markets

Abstract

The evolution of new technology from research laboratory to prototypes and then commercial mass production has shown a fairly consistent pattern of development through at least the eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth, and now the twentyfirst centuries. New ideas have first been developed by inventors or in research laboratories. Patents are filed that protect the original inventor but also establish a framework for further development and improvements. Often the next step is to produce various prototypes that gradually increase the practical capabilities of the new invention, service, or product. These early evolutionary stages help to increase performance and reliability of the new invention. This can also lead to additional developments, new formats, or designs. This can lead to additional patents and production processes which can allow the new product to be manufactured with increased speed and reliability and thus converted from the original prototype to a mature product for a mass-produced marketplace. This evolutionary development process has been true, in varying degrees for steamboats and locomotives, for automobiles, for aircraft, for submarines, for various types of guns and munitions, for telecommunications and networking systems, for radio and televisions, for computers and cell phones, and for a wide array of other inventions and new products consumed by civilians. New products related to military defense and related strategic systems such as for weapon systems, avionics, aviation, telecommunications, computers, and artificial intelligence have particularly seen a high level of governmental research and development involvement in the front end of the research and development to move inventions, to prototypes, to improved prototypes, to initial manufactured products or system, and ultimately to refined systems. Further governments often represent and provide the initial market for a new technology as well. In the case of space systems, governments and military ministries were among the first users of satellites for communications, remote sensing, Earth observation and meteorological monitoring, and GNSS and precise navigation and timing services. In short, in the field of space systems and applications, it has typically been military-related research and governmental spending that has had the predominate role in defining new space technologies and systems and guided their development. This has been true, especially in the USA, Europe, and largely countries of the OECD for a half century. This chapter addresses how “new space” and the small satellite industry has for the first time since World War II redefined the future direction of the space industry. In this new space environment, the new paradigms are being developed not by the key players in the so-called “military-industrial” complex but rather by start-ups, “Silicon Valley”-type entrepreneurial thinking, and even projects pushed by Google, Amazon, and Facebook and entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, etc. This chapter explains how the small satellite revolution and its overall development in terms of new types of launch vehicles, new types of satellite and ground systems design, and new types of space services also represent a shift in the development of space enterprise and services in the twenty-first century. Governments have not led the way but are now supporting this new technology but using it in their own missions and purchasing new types of space services supplied by new small satellite start-ups.