The Space E-Commerce Revolution

In the 1990s, the space community witnessed the revolution that is now the Small Satellite market. Small satellites were initially written off as not being large enough to have any real practical function; however, since the early 2000s, space companies large and small have been falling over themselves to get involved in Small Satellites. This class of spacecraft has proven to be very much more useful than the sceptics proffered. With the Small Satellite market doing very good business, many of us within the Small Satellite community are now wondering where the next revolution will come from. Most think that the smart money is on Picosatellites and Nanosatellites, but this class of spacecraft has yet to prove its technical capability, but it is clear that it is fast becoming the most economically viable method of accessing space.This paper examines the commercial world of picosatellites. In particular, we will look at how the approach to standardisation on platforms such as CubeSats has resulted in the evolution of internet sales of satellite subsystems. As a direct result of standardisation, it has become viable for space companies to produce relatively large numbers of the same subsystem and, as a result, drive down the cost of those systems. This is forcing companies involved in the Picosatellite market to look to alternative methods of doing business in order to help reduce these costs even further. Ecommerce is turning out to be the ideal tool for selling microspacecraft subsystems and it has a huge number of benefits that help the customer make their product selection and also to provide after-sales support. Once picosatellites have proven their technical viability as a useful platform, the next revolution in spacecraft could well already be underway and it looks likely to be a web-based space market