Future satellite designs that incorporate elements such as independent antennas and picosats could provide broadcast capacity up to a thousand times that of today’s geostationary spacecraft, said Joseph Pelton, vice chairman of the Arthur C. Clarke Foundation.

Design studies of concepts such as a rotating tethered cluster spacecraft, where independent antennas rotate around a geostationary spacecraft, and a rotating swarm of picosats acting as an antenna spread across 100 square kilometers, would increase the capacity of geostationary satellites exponentially, Pelton said Oct. 11 at the Arthur C. Clarke Seminar & Awards in Washington D.C. Such satellite concepts, still 10 to 20 years away from being a reality, may be able to carry billions of phone lines and thousands of video channels, he said.

The event, marking the 60th anniversary of the publication of Clarke’s “Extra-Terrestrial Relays,” in which the writer laid out the principles of satellite communications, was sponsored by SES Americom and Intelsat.