Industry disruption by Open Source at the Small Satellite Conference

We are pleased to share the news that the Open Source Satellite Programme has been invited to feature in the technical programme at this year's Small Satellite Conference, with a paper titled “What’s next after industry disruption by CubeSats? – Industry disruption by Open Source”.

Growing the Open Source Space community

We are looking forward to the opportunity to continue our engagement with the global community of space and technology innovators. We’re excited to share ideas and tangible results that can improve the affordability and accessibility of space and enable sustainable missions, applications and services.

What’s next after industry disruption by CubeSats? – Industry disruption by Open Source

Here’s the abstract of our paper.

Less than a decade ago, CubeSat mission architectures featured almost exclusively in the academic domain only. The same can be said today for Open Source satellites.

In the same way that CubeSats and the associated development mindset started in the academic community and are now being embraced by commercial, civil and defence communities worldwide, the goal of the Open Source Satellite Programme is to stimulate and enable a similar outcome for Open Source satellite mission architectures by developing a design that is freely available for all to use.

The team’s goal is to build a global community of Open Source contributors, collaborators and beneficiaries, including those from CubeSat and SmallSat teams who are at the forefront of adopting and championing non-traditional approaches to delivering space missions.

A key characteristic of Open Source projects is the engagement of stakeholders – to provide requirements and use cases, to collaborate to iterate and improve elements of the architecture and design - and ultimately, to be able to leverage and benefit from the design outputs.

The Open Source Satellite Programme is developing a robust, flexible low cost 20kg-250kg satellite platform which addresses future market, mission and programmatic demands, leverages emerging technologies and is scalable from Nanosat to Microsatellite systems, enabling teams to treat the platform as a low cost “commodity” or infrastructure item on which to develop their specific mission.

This Paper will discuss:

• The target Open Source Satellite Platform initial capabilities and technical roadmap for future mission capability enhancements

• The “Clean-Sheet” design methodologies that are being implemented to define the system and mission architecture

• The application of an Open Source development approach for systems in the Space domain

• The types of missions, applications and services that could be enabled with the design; from vLEO to interplanetary missions

• The opportunities that are available for teams to get involved in and benefit from the Open Source Satellite Programme

We’re keen to engage with as many people as possible who are interested in being contributors, collaborators and beneficiaries. There’s no need to wait until the SmallSat conference to have a chat with us: 
Get in touch with us to find out more about the Open Source Satellite Programme and how you can get involved.

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