A random overview of middle-sized small satellite constellations.
Sixty-three years ago, the first artificial satellite of Earth, Sputnik, was deployed on orbit. So many things changed since that time, massive commercialization brought a revolution into space and today, there are more than 2666 satellites in orbit.
In the past 10 years, the category of nanosatellites has grown by a factor of 10. During recent years, this growth was significantly driven by megaconstellations. My assumption is that most of us can name a few single-CubeSat missions and also are familiar with Starlink, Kuiper’s project or OneWeb. But I noticed that there are hidden very interesting projects between the groups in constellations from 100 up to 200 spacecrafts.
Disclaimer: Listed examples are a compilation from sources listed below — some constellations may keep missing. Constellations are in different stages of development — more than in analysis case by case I’m interested in longer-term trend appearance. Apparently, this is also not investment advice. If you consider it so, please share with your friends so they can laugh at your expense. Presented opinions are my own.
Article (1) shows that proposed satellite constellations are almost equally split into communication and earth observation. However other papers usually differ between IoT and Communications category, this one is apparently not doing so. The analysis is also mentioning that proposals on satellite constellations are anything new, however, all of them have been delayed, restyled or have failed. On the example of Iridium, authors show that it’s not easy to build a sustainable business based on them. By using Gartner’s terminology, we can say that initial hype is over, and the phase of real applications is present.
IoT
The previous week, on September 29th, an American company Swarm technologies revealed pricing and products for their IoT satellite constellation. The official announcement states that more than 200 companies are interested in early access to this network.
I choose to write about Swarm Technologies based on their current update. Otherwise, the segment might seem overcrowded. Except for Swarm, other initiatives include Canadian Kepler Communications, French-based Kineis or Swiss Astrocast.
The company I would like to exceptionally focus attention on is Chinese Geely. With almost 1,5M cars sold per year and shares in Daimler, Volvo or Lynk&Co, Zhejiang Geely Holding Group is a significant player on the global automotive industry field. To shape this role, they are also willing to build a LEO satellite constellation to improve geolocation and connected-vehicles function. By word of mouth I have heard that the company is hiring rocket engineers to fulfil comparisons of Geely founder, Mr Li Shufu to Elon Musk.
EO
Also, in the field of remote sensing satellites, several quite similar projects are on the market. Spire, Planet, ExactEarth, Iceye, Maxar… Unlike IoT, most of the current leading EO constellations are already deployed or in the phase of offsetting. As blogpost (2) shows, the main application is proving data for military and surveillance purposes. Even potential usage of satellite imagery is wide and for example, connected with SDG agenda, leading customer is finally the US defence sector.
Potential change to this field might be brought by new market entrants — to name a few Satellogic, Hawkeye360 or SatRevolution. They vary mainly in frequency/resolution and through several business models changes, they can again extend satellite imagery customer base behind security sector. Amongst all players, I would like to mention BlackSky company — they’re obviously serving situational awareness purposes (just sexy name for surveillance), but except selling visual data also offers third-party data layers and own analytical insights.
It’s also good to note that excluding frequency/resolution trade-off, also band matters — for example, PredaSar is planning to build world’s most extend SAR constellation. (This project also shows how common are retired USSF officials into the board of new space companies and necessity to become US-based company in order to apply for proposals there).
Replacing radio
The demand towards real-time data stream is increasing and there are projects focused on the laser-driven downlink. One of them is Analytical Space, which plans to build a relay network of satellites. They consequently crosslink the client’s data to a satellite which downlinks them using hybrid of RF and Laser signal. The key benefit lies in lower latency and option to extend downlink capacity. ESA is planning to deploy a similar concept.
Conclusion
I originally wanted to just pick up a few interesting satellite constellations. Within my passion for the satellite industry, this is a good area to dive deeper — according to Euroconsult, 84% of smallsats in the next decade will be launched within a constellation.
During two days of scrolling through papers, reports, studies and company’s websites, I found that majority of middle-sized small satellite constellations purposes are either Earth Observation or IoT. Compared to data about single smallsats applications, several of them are significantly underrepresented. (I’m using Euroconsult categorization)
- Technology category is not frequent among applications simply because single satellites are enough for technology demonstration. From some point of view, we can consider the first generations of well-known constellations as technology demonstration missions.
- SatCom would be the winner by far. However, Starlink, Kuiper’s project or Iridium, GlobalStar aren’t fitting into restriction for purposes of this article — either too crowded or too heavy.
- Security applications are hidden into EO.
- In-Orbit services satellites also usually don’t appear in the constellations. One of the reasons could be the maturity of industry (still very early stage) of operational reasons — you don’t necessarily need them to work as a constellation.
- Science and exploration constellations are represented by shares worth 4%.
Space and especially satellite industry are fast-developing fields. One of the sources I had used was from 3/2020 and for many companies is after Vega 16 launch situation quite different — that’s only for demonstration how things can change fast.
Thoughts
It’s not a brand new thing, but space on the orbit and RF spectrum is becoming overcrowded. This is a complicated case to set up governance (and also an opportunity to new entrepreneurship ideas).
Projects of satellite constellations are often very similar. This is probably evidence about available venture capital funding and hope for motivation to provide the best services to the customers.
Personally, I’m interested in the way of future competing between players and for example, what will be the key factor to lead an EO field. Price? Coverage? Additional analytics? Accessibility? Or something else? — In every case, it will be exciting to see.
Again, from a personal point of view — there are many cool space companies which are constantly looking for talented business developers and engineers of course. And the decision paralysis comes — which one to choose?
Finally, I mentioned Gartner’s hype curve above. It sounds to me that the satellite constellations market is perfectly fitting to this — I can’t hide my enthusiasm, I’m always so happy when real-world data fit into a theoretical model. This is the situation
Fun at the end — Human shooting stars.
Amongst the majority of IoT and EO constellations, Star-Ale company from Japan is a visible outlier. Their effort is to create man-made shooting stars (yes, really) as a primary goal with secondary missions lying into providing middle atmosphere data.
Resources
(1) Large Constellations of Small Satellites: A Survey of Near Future Challenges and Missions https://www.mdpi.com/2226-4310/7/9/133
(2) An insightful (and funny) article about how defence customers are disbalancing EO data market. https://medium.com/@joemorrison/the-commercial-satellite-imagery-business-model-is-broken-6f0e437ec29d
(3) Simple description of IoT network Kineis and comparison with other market players. https://www.spaceitbridge.com/kineis-another-satellite-iot-play-but-french-aerospace-backing.htm
(4) A McKinsey study — more business oriented point of view. https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/aerospace-and-defense/our-insights/large-leo-satellite-constellations-will-it-be-different-this-time
(General resources) Nanosats.eu and its derivation Newspace.im, especially constellation section, SmallSatellite Market report 2020 by Euroconsult, Spacenews.com, Twitter, and enterprise websites
