Comment by kartikkumar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kartikkumar | Hacker News Reader

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Space hardware is slowly but surely becoming commoditized and accessible. There are a number of initiatives to break open the market on the smallsat side.

Groups like the Libre Space Foundation [1] and LibreCube [2] are doing a great job of opening up the whole stack (software+hardware for space, launch, and ground systems). Projects like Ardusat [3] are also helping to "democratize" space, to use a cliche. Ardusat actually led to the founding of Spire [4], one of many commercial EO constellation companies that have benefited from the process of commoditization.

The "giant leap" really is closing a lot faster than people realize.

If you're interested in exploring the kind of hardware on the space market, check out https://satsearch.co. We've currently got 5,000+ products & services for the space market listed, with the goal being to use data to crack open the supply chain, enabling spin-in, spin-out, tech transfer, etc.

Disclaimer: I'm one of the co-founders at satsearch.

[1] https://libre.space

[2] https://librecube.org

[3] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/575960623/ardusat-your-...

[4] https://www.spire.com/en

Some thoughts I've had on the commoditized hardware. Would it be more accurate to say that launches have gotten cheap enough to make it even worth talking about putting up "cheap hardware" into orbit?

I say 'cheap' in the sense that the hardware is not designed/have "engineered lifespans" to actually stay functional for long periods of time in space. As long as they go up, stay on for a few months and don't care that much about cosmic rays flipping bits to make 1+1=3, its good enough.

I think that's definitely one way of looking at it. Planet [1] kinda pioneered this idea as "Agile Aerospace" [2]. When I visited the Planet HQ in SF, I remember having lunch with a bunch of their Doves (flight hardware) lying on the table next to me :P That was sorta unthinkable 20 years ago.

There's definitely a changing attitude towards what can be launched into space. The "cheap" satellites are not going to necessarily achieve the extreme performance needed for some missions, but by being more commercial, there's a new wave of missions that target specific, market-driven use-cases, and they don't all need the latest/greatest/fanciest tech.

Additionally, the orbit you fly in affects this conversation a lot. For Low Earth Orbit <1000 km, I'm confident that the market is going to be dominated by commodity hardware, except for flagship missions perhaps.

Higher altitudes require greater reliability due to radiation and are just more expensive orbits to get to. So I think it's going to take a little longer. Having said that, there are a bunch of companies tackling the higher orbits, like SpaceX with Starlink [3], and even YC alum Astranis [4] in GEO.

The way I like to think of it is that the space sector is maturing from a craft to a profession, and with that, commoditization offers a clear path towards scalability.

[1] https://www.planet.com

[2] https://www.planet.com/company/approach

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink_(satellite_constellat...

[4] https://www.astranis.com

The CubeSat projects at Cal Poly and Stanford I think are what led to lowering costs and allowing the launch of riskier hardware and spawned this corner of the space industry. Planet was definitely one of the first to have the vision to commercialize that capability.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CubeSat

Sure, the CubeSat standard was a big breakthrough of course. Bob Twiggs & Jordi Puig-Suari really helped to push forward the idea of standardization as a path towards reducing costs, but it was primarily intended as a learning platform for grad students.

I kinda draw the analogy of how the Raspberry Pi went from being a learning tool, to something that hackers/makers saw as an opportunity to innovate on. CubeSats went through a similar transition.

The work that then led to commercial activities came from a lot of different people have similar ideas about how commoditization can help to reduce costs and allow for riskier projects.

There's actually a strong bias in the media that doesn't reflect the diversity of projects, missions, and technologies on the market at the moment. The idea of using a platform like CubeSats to open up the space sector is a lot more widespread than I think more people are aware of.

The way that I have seen it is that cheaper launches and the widespread rideshare options have definitely changed how accessible space is. The cheaper launches made it so people/companies didn't have to worry as much about reducing risk before launching it in to space. Planet is a good example, their production line of satellites is not typically what you see in the aerospace industry. But with the cheaper launches you don't care as much if only 80% (this is just an example, I don't have any actual data Planet keeps that pretty close to the chest) of your satellites survive.

This has also led to a lot more university level science projects too. And the increased economies of scale for cubesat components have driven priced down low enough that there are high school classes launching cubesats.

Are you aware of the recently announced service from Amazon AWS called Ground Station? Any thoughts on the utility of that to help open up space to a broader community? A lot of people kind of joked about it, but I though it was an interesting idea.

I was actually in a seminar a couple of weeks ago given by the head of Ground Station :).

Pretty remarkable that a company like Amazon allows for experiments like Ground Station. They have a pretty clear business model and I think that it will help to open up the sector even further, in the sense that now you can just grab your satellite data in pretty much the same way you operate on AWS otherwise.

It's also interesting, because Amazon came somewhat late to the game and sorta blew open the market. Friends of mine founded Leaf Space [1] and they've sorta built a similar concept from the ground up, deploying antenna around the world.

Then you've got efforts like KSAT Lite [2], InfoStellar [3], ATLAS [4], and RBC Signals [5], so it's a pretty hot market at the moment.

I'm excited about AWS entering into the market because I believe it'll accelerate development of some pretty cutting-edge technologies like laser satcom, that will change the way we think of data from space.

[1] https://leaf.space

[2] https://www.ksat.no/en/news/2016/january/ksat%20lite-network

[3] https://www.infostellar.net

[4] https://www.atlasground.com

[5] http://rbcsignals.com

LM is doing something like this. See Lockheed Martin Verge:

https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/products/verge.html

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