Noted: In the last few years, the rate of launches of miniature satellites has increased exponentially. The industry is “moving away from these really large satellites that are expensive to build, expensive to launch, and into satellites that are highly specialized and often intended to last,” says Lisa Ruth Rand, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies the environmental history of near-Earth space. “The smaller the satellite, the cheaper it is to launch, the better rate a company will get.”
Office of Strategic Communication