LOGAN, Utah — The number of smallsats forecasted to launch in the next decade is declining as some satellites get heavier.
In a presentation at a side meeting during the Small Satellite Conference Aug. 7, Gabriel Deville, senior consultant at Novaspace, said his company was forecasting 14,500 smallsats would launch in the next decade. Novaspace, formed earlier this year from the merger of Euroconsult and SpaceTec Partners, defines smallsats as those weighing no more than 500 kilograms.
That number is down from the 23,000 forecasted a year ago by Euroconsult. “It’s because, in the meantime, one operator that launched a lot of smallsats is no longer launching any more: Starlink,” he said.
SpaceX, of course, is continuing to deploy Starlink satellites, but the “V2 mini” spacecraft the company is now launching weigh about 750 kilograms, well above the cutoff used by the study. Earlier versions of Starlink satellites weighed 300 kilograms or less. Future Starlink satellites will be even heavier.
Deville said that increase in mass is part of a broader industry trend as operators seek to increase performance of their spacecraft, particularly those moving into second-generation constellations.
The average mass of smallsats launched in 2017 was just 19 kilograms, “when the cubesat was still king,” he said. By 2023, that grew to 199 kilograms. Even when broadband satellites are excluded, that average mass grew to 44 kilograms in 2023.
“A lot of satellites in constellations are seeking more performance, whether it’s in Earth observation or in broadband and connectivity,” he said, with a “sweet spot” emerging around 200 kilograms.
“Large satellites are not dead yet, for sure,” he concluded. “There will always be room for small satellites and miniaturization, but large satellites, in many use cases, are necessary.”
The increase in satellite mass is just one of several challenges facing the smallsat industry. The Novaspace study found several others, from decreasing private investment in the industry in the last few years to a bottleneck in launch access.
One key one is a mismatch between supply and demand in smallsat manufacturing. Deville noted that many companies have scaled up production of satellites, with an overall capacity of thousands of smallsats a year to be offered to customers.
However, of the annual average of 1,450 smallsats in the study, more than 90%, or 1,320, are considered captive in some way and not open to competition. That includes smallsats that are built by constellation operators, like Amazon’s Project Kuiper, as part of a broader push towards vertical integration.
“We’re definitely going towards a situation where supply of satellite manufacturing largely outweighs demand,” he said.
