Sir Martin Sweeting OBE FRS FREng FIET

摘要

Since the early 1980’s, small satellites have evolved steadily in their capabilities and most importantly their utility – to the point where, in the last few years, they have both provided lower cost and more responsive solutions to meet well-trodden applications whilst also stimulating completely new business models – fundamentally changing the economics of space … for both the civil and the security/defence sectors. The underlying technologies that have enabled this ‘peaceful revolution’ have come from the enormous investments made by the industrial and domestic consumer sectors that have created mass markets for their products … reducing the unit production costs by orders of magnitude whilst at the same time achieving high yield and reliability through a parallel revolution in manufacturing & production techniques. Small satellites have been very effective in taking advantage of ‘COTS’ microelectronics to create small, low-cost yet capable and reliable satellites. However, up to the beginning of this decade, the evolution of small satellites was being driven primarily by advances in microelectronics, whilst the structural designs tended to be based on more conventional techniques.