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The Promise of Modular Satellites
SpaceX has launched both a real car (Elon Musk's Tesla Roadster), and what Wired refers to as the rocketry equivalent of a clown car [wired.com] into space.
It was about a year ago that SpaceX launched
A rocket crowded with more than 60 small satellites. Inside one of them, Excite, were even more. It was actually a satellite made of other satellites, all clones of each other, all capable of joining together and working together. It was one of the first in-space tests of such a contraption—but in the coming years, this modular approach is likely to show up on more and more missions.
Excite (made by the company NovaWurks [novawurks.com]) consists of 14 Lego-like 'satlets' (or 'HiSats') that are smaller than a sheet of paper and only a few inches thick.
The great promise of satlets is that they are agnostic about what instruments they support and about what function they fulfill. They can be mass-produced, which both slashes costs and dents the idea that each new instrument to be sent into orbit requires a whole new satellite. Instead, you can buy a satlet (or 15) that will provide everything your camera, radar device, radio detector, infrared sensor, or data processor will need. In theory, the set can also fix itself after launch by reallocating resources: A group of linked satlets can share functions among themselves and adjust their effort based on changing needs. If a battery in one gets a bad cell, for instance, its partners can help out.
Other government agencies such as the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) are also investigating the use of small standardized satellites that instruments can be attached to based on the mission.
[T]he NRO established a new “Greenlighting” program in 2017, to provide developers with a quick, cheap way to test technology in space. The NRO has created a standard interface, the size of a deck of cards, that people can stick their experiments into. Multiple interfaces can be stacked together, and experiments swapped in or out, before launch.
The promised reductions in cost and time to orbit will potentially allow for the massive risk averse missions of yesterday to slowly morph into nimble risk accepting missionlets in the future.
