Fascinating article on the current push at "SmallSat" technologies:
Over the last decade or so the definition of what a ‘small satellite’ is has ballooned beyond the original cubesat design specification
to satellites of 50 or 100 kg. Today a ‘smallsat’ is defined far more
around the cost, and sometimes the technologies used, than the size and
shape of the box that goes into orbit.
There are now more than fifty companies
working on launch vehicles dedicated to lifting these small satellites
into orbit, and while nobody really expects all of those to survive the
next few years, it’s going to be an interesting time in the launcher
market. Because I have a sneaking suspicion that Jeff Bezos’ statement
that “there’s not that much interesting about cubesats” may well turn
out to be the twenty first century’s “nobody needs more than 640kb,” and
it’s possible that everybody is wrong about how many of the launcher
companies will survive in the long term
read more at:
http://hackaday.com/2017/02/09/the-smallsat-launcher-war/
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