The Status
Hardly any other field of applied science and technology has influenced our world as much as the development and utilization of satellites. It enabled the way we live and communicate (phone, data transmission, entertainment art and culture), it is essential for…
…food production (weather forecast, crops growth observation and harvest predictions etc.), it is becoming essential for water resource utilization and predictions, it ensures the transportation of people and goods worldwide (GPS, WAAS etc.), and it is still one of the driving forces in the development of new materials, new technologies and new concepts.
The (near) Future
The scope of the utilization of satellite technology in orbit (and the data they produce) will dramatically increase in the near future. Applications, nobody is presently imagining will…
…also become THE driving factor for the development of future technologies like artificial intelligence, digitization (efficient processing and use of large amounts of data) and secure quantum communication, Internet of Things (IoT) and many others. Those technologies will be developed/invented very often first for the use in space but subsequently will be introduced to many other terrestrial industries and sectors, impacting everybody’s daily life in this process.
The Opportunities
In the past, it was only for a small number of countries possible to accomplish this in a holistic way since it required enormous financial means, workforce and highly specialized infrastructure. However, this has changed…
…over the last decade since the space industry has undergone two radical shifts in this time:
• Single large satellites are replaced by constellations of much smaller satellites. Mission risk is therefore distributed to a larger number of satellites and subsequently overall mission risk
is reduced. Furthermore, due to the larger numbers of satellites, developing and building them is much more economic compared to one single large satellite.
• Instead of a small amount of large countries (USA, Russia, France, etc.) or large companies (e.g. the European Primes: OHB, Airbus, Thales Alenia), a steadily increasing number of small and medium size companies worldwide is involved building those constellations.
The Challenge
The economic winner in this development are those countries and players, who have started early to build up and utilize expertise in satellite technology since…
…only those have the capability to autonomously develop and test the new technologies. Austria has many singular points of expertise in Small Satellites (aka Nano- and Microsatellites), distributed in various companies and R&D entities. In order to participate in the Small Satellite field as a force to be reckoned with, Austria needs to connect those points, identify and improve weak points and strengthen already existing points. To do so is the objective of the Project “Small Satellite Research Network”, (SSRN)
