SMALL SATELLITE LAUNCH OPPORTUNITIES: STATISTICAL ANALYSIS AND TREND FORECAST

摘要

In the last two decades, the concepts of miniaturisation, modularity, and commercialisation has lowered threshold of space mission design, especially for small satellites, which stimulates the market demands for small satellite launch opportunities. However, the limited choices of small satellite launch opportunities are hindering the market growth or delaying the mission schedules. This paper focuses on the statistical analysis and trend forecast of small satellite launch opportunities both on its demand and supply sides to provide an overall understanding of potential market demands. By looking up the historical cases, a survey on existing and potential small satellite launch vehicles is carried out. The data processing and analysis are dual: on the micro level, different key user-defined objectives of classified launch vehicle, e.g., orbit altitude, launch cost, and payload mass, are taken into consideration to make a comprehensive assessment of their launch capabilities; on the macro level, the statistical characteristics of different types of space missions, are estimated to generate a characteristic summary of current launch cases and trend forecast of future launch opportunities. In conclusion, such a statistical analysis not only benefits the small satellites launch opportunity providers in the perspective of offering more market demanding, economical and competitive options, but also deepens the knowledge and understanding of space system designers on small satellite launch opportunities.