January 2017
Elon Musk and Mars - looking for a snowball effect
..., Mars colonisation will become possible. But getting the transport and life-support technologies up to the required standards of high reliability and low cost will inevitably require several decades of development. Therefore, the painstaking growth...
June 2017
Spaceplane rationale - a new way of thinking
... and maintenance cost; several years of operating service and product improvement would be needed to come close to these standards. However, early spaceplanes would still be safer and far less expensive than expendable launchers so initial models...
August 2017
Big science from small spacecraft
... missions, but rendezvous missions where we catch up with a comet take a little longer and will require a higher standard of reliability: ESA’s flagship Rosetta mission took 10 years to rendezvous with comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko. Such long...
January 2018
Maximising the economic opportunities of deep space
... scalable.Their costs of operation were plagued with inefficiency due to a lack of standards and scale. To solve these issues, the regional providers required national standards and national connectivity which everyone agreed would be a boon for all...
February 2018
Growth drivers, requirements and threats in the smallsat industry
.... Nanosatellites (up to 10 kg) will continue to take the greatest share. Microsatellites (10-200 kg), however, are becoming the standard mass classification for mega-constellations. DIWATA-1 satellite is deployed from outside of the Japanese Kibo...
February 2018
CubeSats changing the landscape for ‘app’ developers
...others. USB is now a small, simple, and robust industry standard for the connection of computer peripherals. Hot swapping is taken for ...Instead, they develop their apps against well-defined standard interfaces that are the same across most smartphones...
