Spacedev Chairman and CEO Jim Benson hopes the company’s newly unveiled MMB-100 microsatellite will change the satellite industry the way microcomputers changed the computer world.

The microsatellite bus is intended to serve the needs of commercial and government operators with a low-cost, high performance alternative to larger, more complex satellites. All the new satellite will need to make an impact is a reliable small launch vehicle, Benson said. “What I am doing is trying to bring the microcomputer revolution to space, because space is a $100 billion industry bogged down in the old mainframe way of thinking,” Benson told Satellite News.

The MMB-100 is a modular 100-kilogram microsatellite that Spacedev expects to offer for less than $10 million, not including the price of the payload and payload integration. The key to the low cost is the satellite’s use of industry-standard interfaces such as Ethernet and USB, as well as standards such as the Linux operating system and command and control via an Internet connection.

Chipsat

A year after founding Spacedev in 1997, Benson was told that it was virtually impossible to build a satellite for less than $40 million, because the hardware alone was $20 million and the rule of thumb was another $20 million for labor.

“In 1999, we started exploring the development of Chipsat for UC Berkeley under a NASA-funded program which was capped at $13 million, all-inclusive,” Benson said. Chipsat, was developed for $7.8 million, and the spacecraft, intended to last only 12 to 18 months, will mark its third year of “flawless operation,” in January, he said.

Meeting Chipsat’s cost goals put Spacedev on the road to building microsatellites based on industry standards. “Even though we developed the flight computer ourselves from scratch, we use the VX Works operating system and VX Works comes with TCP/IP,” Benson said. “So our whole communications protocol is already programmed. We didn’t write a single line of code. That was really important in terms of using a standard off-the-shelf operating system and a standard communication protocol. NASA greatly resisted both of those saying that they had never been done before, therefore, it should not be done.”

The success of Chipsat helped Spacedev land a $43 million contract to develop two sets of three microsatellites for the U.S. Missile Defense Agency (MDA). “We are currently just getting ready to go into the development of the first three,” Benson said. “These MDA satellites will be 100 kilograms with the payload. They are about three times more capable than Chipsat was. They will have crosslinks so the three formation-flying satellites can be in communication with each other.”

With the development funding that MDA provided, Benson said Spacedev is able bring the technology developed under that contract into the commercial space.

Falcon Development Provides Hope

Microsatellites can meet the communications needs of both commercial and military users, as well as for scientific missions for NASA, Benson said. Research conducted by Spacedev about three years ago under contract from the California Space Authority determined there is an ongoing demand for 600 to 700 small satellites, most of them in the microsatellite category, he said.

However, the market for microsatellites remains untapped because of “the lack of cheap access to space,” Benson said. “As companies like Spacedev drive the cost of satellites down from $40 million to less than $10 million, it makes less sense to launch them on a $25 million or $30 million launch vehicle.”

Benson noted that even getting a microsatellite onto a heavy lift launch vehicle as a secondary payload is challenging. “The only reason Chipsat ever launched was because the other microsatellite scheduled to launch wasn’t ready,” he said. “It that hadn’t happened, Chipsat would be sitting on a shelf today like so many other small worthy satellite that have been developed but can’t get launched.

Many small satellite proponents are eagerly watching the development of the small Falcon launch vehicle by Space Exploration Technologies Corp., Benson said. The first Falcon 1 launch, scheduled to take place before the end of 2005, will carry an experimental satellite built by the U.S. Air Force Academy.

A successful launch “can help break this bottleneck and open up this burgeoning demand for microsatellites for the commercial sector, the military sector and for NASA space science and technology demonstrations,” he said. “We think the exponential demand is latent at any given time, but won’t be unleashed until there is inexpensive launch capability.”

–Gregory Twachtman

(Jim Benson, Spacedev, 858/375-2020)