The Internet Ruins Everything: The Sixth Age of Small Satellites

The year 2020 marked the start of the Sixth Age of Smallsats. One may sensibly ask, “Sixth age? What happened to the first five?” And thus the need for this paper. In this context, “Smallsat” is more of a design ethos than a size classification. One might call it a constraint-driven approach to space mission design, contrasted with the traditional requirements-driven approach. Smallsats are typically associated with rideshare/piggyback/secondary launches, but their distinguishing characteristic is a program-level willingness to aggressively trade mission performance to meet cost and schedule. Herein, I will review the five previous ages of Smallsats (1957–1965, 1966–1981, 1982–1997, 1998–2008, 2009–2019) and justify these classifications. Specifically, I will show how each age had a distinct set of missions, risk profiles and external opinions of small satellites. Besides the obvious benefit of cleverly dressing up a history paper, the purpose of distinguishing between ages is that it helps us understand how to pursue small-satellite missions in our present age - especially for those of us stuck in a Fourth-Age mindset. I will demonstrate that we are in a new, sixth age, with a new set of baseline assumptions about the performance and risk associated with small satellites. This Sixth Age has two distinguishing characteristics: 1) Large numbers of Smallsats fly on the same rocket as large, expensive primes, and nobody thinks that this is unusual; 2) Large piles of cash from private & public financing are converted into commercial satellite-based services. I dub this Sixth Age, “The Internet Ruins Everything”, based on my concern that the small satellite industry has too many parallels with the Meme Stock craze. I will conclude the paper by convincing myself that I'm wrong about the coming realignment (aka crash), partly because for five years I've been writing worried papers predicting the imminent realignment that hasn't (yet) happened. It won't help.