Welcome to Small Satellites Systems and Services Symposium

More recently, the word ‘transformation’ has been used by CEOs to explain companies’ strategic actions to move away from their core business to avoid being wiped out by a fast-changing economy. All the sectors seem affected: retail stores stormed by the e-commerce, car manufacturers moving to sharing cars with zero emission, hospitality business introducing the concept of shared economy. Cleaner and healthier e-bikes calls for a redesign of space dedicated to personal transportation in large cities.

Transformation of economies are driven by a change in values and accelerated by new technologies: more environmentally savvy generations, such as gen-z, and constant connectivity, are driving a transformation toward a circular economy, re-use of consumer products bought on-line from home are more fashionable than shiny new garments purchased in the store downtown.

The space sector has already been affected: large telecom satellites have been impacted by the shift from direct TV broadcasting to on-line media services. Transformations in economy are profound and may happen in a blink of an eye, pushing out of business an entire market sector. Can these events be predicted; how companies can prepare themselves? Are small satellites being affected by a transformation? Or better, what combination of mentality shift and technology innovation will induce a transformation in the small satellite business.

New Space, new minds: is gen-z bringing a mentality shift in the small satellites business? Is “clean space” pushing toward a paradigm shift? how is cloud computing, AI, large telecom constellations, in-orbit transfer vehicles, and any other new technology impacting the way we design satellites and use the data they generate? Similarly, how the access to satellite data in the range of Petabyte is transforming data exploitation and generating new possible applications? Going one step further, will space transformation also affect society? How far are we from the point that Earth’s digital twin will transform the way we live on our planet and helps reaching sustainability?

A special session will be dedicated to Space Transformation. Authors are invited to send their contribution on the topic addressing any of the questions reported above.