Craig Clark's stall at the 2005 International Astronautical Congress in Japan was a modest affair. He had left Surrey Satellite Technology Limited, one of UK's leading small satellite manufacturers, that same year to start his own satellite startup, Clyde Space Limited. At the time the company was about two weeks old and employed only one person. Himself. "I was trying to sell the company as being bigger than it was," he remembers.
The location he had chosen for his new high tech company was neither the United Kingdom's financial, political and economic hub, London, nor the technological clusters around Oxford and Cambridge.
He chose Glasgow, Scotland, where he had done his undergraduate degree.
Now after eight years of supplying bespoke satellite components to clients around the world, Clark is about to see his company's first in-house satellite, UKube-1, launched into space.
But this isn't just any run of the mill satellite. UKube-1, commissioned by the UK Space Agency (UKSA), will be the first CubeSat put into orbit by the UKSA. "Once we've got UKube-1 up [we'll have] shown that we've got the capability to put a mission into orbit," says Clyde.
It will be a seal of approval not only for Clyde Space Limited, but also for a satellite platform whose small size belies its revolutionary potential to change the way that space agencies, universities and even the public use space.
Space commodity
Measuring just 10 centimetres cubed and usually weighing around a kilogram, CubeSats are a standardised platform for building satellites. First developed in the late 90s at California Polytechnic State University and Stanford University, the CubeSat was originally intended be a way of educating students about the capabilities of Sputnik, the first man-made satellite put into orbit around the Earth.
It was a "learning by doing" approach: want to learn about satellites? Let's build one! By 2003, the first CubeSat, QuakeSat, had been launched into orbit.
Clark first heard about the new platform through conversations at the Astronautical Congress in Japan, two years later. He immediately saw the potential for a standardised satellite platform. "The fact that's everything's standard means that you can make a product," he explains. The satellite industry is currently service-based, meaning that everything is made bespoke and to-order.
With CubeSats you can start to sell people a commodity. Like Ikea furniture, satellites will never be easy to construct, but now "you've got a user manual, a datasheet and a 3D model that [you] can download, and you've got an online shop where people can buy their power systems [etc] with their credit card," says Clark.
Clyde Space was one of the earliest companies (second in Clark's estimation) to get involved commercially with CubeSats -- the first being Pumpkin, Inc in San Francisco -- and now around 40 percent of CubeSat missions (there have been an estimated 100 or so put into space) carry Clyde Space hardware. Clark says Clyde Space has more than 300 power systems and 1000 solar panels for CubeSats, a statistic that goes to show the extent to which CubeSats are still an educational tool: most people who build CubeSats don't end up putting them into space.
Ten years after the first launch in 2003, the CubeSat market is still fledgling, but companies and research groups around the world are racing to develop. And one word is driving them. "Constellations," says Clark. "[That's] the killer app for CubeSats."
Where satellites dare not roam
If you had previously assumed that getting into orbit was about flying upwards really fast, think again. Getting into orbit, as this xkcd "What If" post eloquently describes, is mostly about going sideways really fast. In orbit, you're constantly falling, which is why there is "zero gravity". The trick to is make sure the ground falls away before you have time to hit it. Things like the International Space Station are essentially falling with style.
But even at the altitude that the ISS orbits, around 370 kilometres, there is still some atmosphere present to cause drag.
At the boundary between Earth and space, the thermosphere, the density of air is tiny but it's enough to slow the ISS and require it to be boosted up from time to time to keep it in orbit.
In short, there's a good reason why most satellites are in much higher altitudes.
"If you build an industrial satellite, spending hundreds of millions of euros, and then launch it into [the thermosphere], in three months the satellite is going to fall back down to earth.
It's not worth the effort," says Cem Asma of the Von Karman institute.
If you want to get closer to the Earth, you need to have a cheap satellite that you don't mind losing anyway. Luckily, Asma and his colleague Jan Thoemel don't just have one cheap satellite that they don't mind losing -- they have 50.
In July 2015, a constellation of CubeSats, known as QB50, built by more than a thousand students and academics at universities across the world, will be launched into space.
Initially starting at a height of 350 kilometres, during the six months of the project, the satellites will steadily drift down through the atmosphere, recording data about the thermosphere at a range of heights and at a level of detail never before achieved.
The constellation allows Asma and Thoemel to escape a fundamental limitation that would make their data useless. With a single satellite making measurements, you could never figure out whether changes in the data were because of changes over time, or merely because your satellite is now kilometres away from the position of the first measurement. In short, you can't investigate the dynamics of the thing you're measuring. "If we can have 50 satellites performing the same measurement 50 different times [...] in a continuous way, then you would have a very good idea about the dynamics of [thermosphere]," explains Asma.
But it's not only in science experiments that CubeSats can demonstrate the power of having a string of pearls in orbit. "[With a constellation] you can see all parts of the Earth, whether it be [for] communications or Earth observation or for gathering science data, you'll be able to get much wider coverage," says Craig Clark.
Use it, bin it, build a better one, repeat
San Francisco-based startup NanoSatisfi shares his vision. Spawned from a successful Kickstarter campaign for an educational CubeSat project called ArduSat, NanoSatisfi is one of the companies looking at building a network of eyes in the sky. They want any company or individual to be able to easily and cheaply rent satellite time for their imaging and data needs.
"Consider the capabilities of being able to revisit [a] specific point on Earth within a hour and combine that with not just a radio signal but also a photo," says Chris Wake, vice-president of business development at NanoSatisfi. "[...] With a small, rapidly improving network of satellites you could provide really up to the minute coverage over [land and] water for any sort of large asset tracking."
A low-orbit constellation allows for straightforward communication with the satellites, fast download and upload times and easier imaging than at higher orbits. Obviously the low-orbit also means that your constellation doesn't stay in the sky for very long, but NanoSatisfi see this need for constant replenishment as an advantage rather than a downside.
For example, NanoSatisfi currently has two demonstration CubeSats on the ISS, which are due to be released into orbit in December. Those satellites have 1.3 megapixel cameras, hardly the sort of specs upon which to build an asset tracking service. But "[by December] we're making an order of magnitude jump on ground resolution capabilities and that's just a matter of months."
Wake compares it to the development cycles of modern smartphones, with new iPhones coming out each year and new Samsung Android phones seemingly appearing each weekend. "The average satellite up there today is a 486 PC running Windows 95," he jokes. "[...] If you start to treat satellites in much the same way [as smartphones], you can get rapidly improving satellites up there really quickly."
That perspective is impossible with large made-to-order multi-million dollar satellites -- but when you can bulk order a standard product, a disposable commodity, it begins to become realistic.
Space Nexus
Across the CubeSat industry you hear the same references to CubeSats as the smartphones of the satellite industry. For example, Craig Clark: "I think of the large geostationary satellites as [...] big mainframe servers. [...] Satellites the size of a car, they're like your desktop computers and CubeSats are like smartphones."
But Clark's former employer, Surrey Satellite Technology Limited (SSTL), are not only making the reference, they've taken the comparisons to the extreme: right now, there is a Google Nexus One orbiting the Earth.
Launched in February 2013 on-board the Strand-1 satellite, the Google Nexus One is intended to act as the satellite's brain, replacing the specialised hardware usually used in satellites. "The mobile phone [...] is pretty much the most advanced pound for pound piece of hardware you can buy at the moment," says Doug Liddle, Head of Science at SSTL.
As well as the access to some incredibly powerful electronics that smartphones offer, Liddle sees a software opportunity: "If we could in the future, find a way to run our satellites off an Android-style OS then we would have a whole world full of software developers that we could recruit, whereas at the moment it's quite a niche capability to be able to write space software."
Tapping into both the modern consumer hardware market but also into the mass of software expertise could help enable a range of applications for CubeSats, from astronomy to Star Wars droid-style maintenance on larger satellites. "If you put together 10 or more of these satellites, [...] with a mother ship in the middle, it allows you to construct this wonderfully detailed map of the universe at a higher resolution than currently exists," says Liddle, describing a proposal SSTL helped make to the European Space Agency (ESA) for a CubeSat radio telescope in space.
In the end, ESA was "a little bit worried" about the readiness of CubeSat technology.
Indeed, the Strand-1 mission is currently well behind schedule due to problems in communicating with the satellite. It has to be told to switch to running from its standard computing systems to the Google Nexus, but due to "a few ground station issues" that's yet to happen.
"We've had some issues in talking to the satellite and in downlinking data," admits Liddle. "We're getting over those now but it requires a lot of debugging." Debugging requires time, and when you're collaborating with a volunteer research project at the University of Surrey, time can be a scarce commodity. "[CubeSats] are becoming more useful and more relevant," he notes earlier in our phone conversation. "[But] we're still in a position where people are struggling to build business cases of them."
How small is small? But from San Francisco, where NanoSatisfi and other small satellite companies like Planet Labs are trying to build Earth-imaging systems, to the QB50 project based out of Belgium, to Clyde Space Limited in Glasgow, where Clark's team place and solder tiny CubeSat components by hand, people are making headway. "[We're] changing the paradigm that existed where you needed to be a rocket scientist or a government or have hundreds of millions of dollar to access space," says NanoSatisfi's Chris Wake.
Venture capitalists are beginning to take note, with Grishin Robotics investing $300,000 (£190,000) in the NanoSatisfi earlier this year. Valery Komissarova, business development director at Grishin, sees the trends in the nanosatellite industry as part of a "democratisation of space".
However, Cornell PhD student Zachary Manchester thinks that CubeSats are still too big to truly open up space access to the public. He is behind KickSat, a mission due to piggy back aboard a ISS resupply mission in 2014.
Billed as "your personal spacecraft in space", Kicksat was funded through Kickstarter in 2011, like many other CubeSat projects.
Aboard the single CubeSat in the KickSat mission are 120 sprites, femtosatellites measuring only 3.5 centimetres squared. By packing many satellites into one CubeSat mothership, the unit cost is reduced even further, making it possible for an ordinary person to own one (for the short time its in orbit) for just a few hundred dollars.
"If you used the latest and greatest semiconductor technology, you could make a one-centimetre-squared satellite," says Manchester. "There isn't really a size limit."
There are still a number of challenges the CubeSat community faces, including developing propulsion systems and ensuring that the CubeSat movement doesn't add to the problem of space debris.
But their low cost is continuing to drive them forward. "You can afford to do things with these, or take risks, or go different places with these that you wouldn't go with the larger or more expensive satellites," says Manchester.
Back at Clyde Space Limited, Craig Clark's are currently adding the "finishing touches", which include some fancy pop-art, before delivering it at the end of the month; the launch is currently scheduled for December.
The components and now satellites made at Clyde Space, although relatively cheap, are still informed by standards and procedures of the old space industry. "We place [circuit components] by hand and solder by hand using a microscope," he says. "All the solder joints need to be perfect."
That's partly because CubeSats still have much to prove: "We just need to make sure the success rate of CubeSats is [high] because there's still people out there who don't believe that CubeSats will be reliable enough to do anything useful."
It just so happens that it's a company based out of Glasgow, Scotland that's helping to prove the doubters wrong.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
