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.
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.
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.
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.
While I agree wholeheartedly about the fact that USB is a disaster for interconnect, CAN is a mixed bag.
The fact that CAN systems are limited to 8 bytes a transaction is a blessing and a curse. If everything can fit in 8 bytes--and generally broadcast--then CAN is awesome. It is fully differential. It has a really good autobaud algorithm. It has CRC and bit stuffing to avoid too many 1's or 0's in a row. It automatically retries under most conditions. It has a specified arbitration algorithm if two devices attempt to grab the bus.
If, however, you start needing bidirectional transactions or transactions larger than 8 bytes, it's not so good. And, one of the big problems today is that secure channel setup almost always requires bidirectional exchanges larger than 8 bytes.
Under most conditions, nowadays, you should probably reach for Ethernet, first. There is a reason why practically every standard (Ethernet, HDMI, USB-C, Displayport, Thunderbolt) has converged to 4 matched pairs for data transmission.
The single condition nowadays that would drive you towards CAN is truly deterministic, hard real-time timing.
I have worked with CAN on spacecraft and it was always a great option for what we needed. It is used as the critical communications bus on the spacecraft where the real-time timing is needed. So systems that control telemetry, tracking and control (TTC) and attitude determination and control of the spacecraft are usually run on CAN or something similar.
But there is always a mix of communications standards. For higher speed data (such as from an imaging payload) then other standards such as Ethernet, LVDS, Spacewire, etc. are used.
For a critical communications bus in space there aren't that many good options. CAN and MIL-STD-1553 are probably the most common that you will find. I have worked with both and CAN is definitely much nicer to use.
If you want to play around with what you might realistically be able to one day send into space, there's free STL files for 1U, 2U and 3U size cubesat chassis available online for 3d printing.
Gives you a good idea of the challenge in fitting solar panels, batteries, flight controller, radios, insulation, etc into a 1U cubesat.
> It’s fair to say that the majority of Hackaday readers have not built any hardware that’s slipped the surly bonds of Earth and ventured out into space proper.
s/hardware/software/. I'm curious to know what the ISS "tech stack" is…
The thinkpads run a custom build of Debian stable. A huge variety of embedded systems, Zarya for example was designed to function as a solo free flying spacecraft.
The same way they work everywhere else. Its just a pressure differential and a relatively small one compared to things like high pressure gas tanks we have here on earth. The 14PSI they need to keep in vs the 0 PSI outside is relatively small compared to even something like a tubeless road bicycle tire.
Is there something in particular you're interested in?
Temperature swings affecting the seal materials are probably a bigger issue than the pressure differential. Your car's tires handle a similar ~1 atmosphere seal easily.
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