Thirty Years of Smallsat Conferences

摘要

That is, in 2016, hardly a surprising statement: recent years have demonstrated that smallsats can increasingly perform missions that used to require larger spacecraft with larger price tags. However, in 1987, the year that paper was published, that was a fairly radical conclusion. The author, though, knew what he was writing about: Dr. Martin Sweeting led the development of two smallsats at the University of Surrey, and established a company to commercialize that work: Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd. (SSTL), which is today one of the world's leaders in smallsats. And he was presenting to a sympathetic audience, in the form of the first Conference on Small Satellites at Utah State University.