How the smallsat business is evolving: Excerpts from the Space Minds podcast

During the 39th annual Small Satellite Conference in Salt Lake City, Utah, in August, SpaceNews hosted a group of industry leaders on our Space Minds podcast to discuss the latest in smallsats and where this part of the industry is headed. These excerpts from our conversations, which have been lightly edited for clarity and brevity, highlight the new challenges and opportunities small satellite makers face. Check out the full conversations at spacenews.com/space-minds-podcast.

Reliability is a differentiator

Sir Martin Sweeting, chairman of Surrey Satellite Technology Limited and professor of the Surrey Space Institute: “Small satellites had a little bit of bad press. Going back 10 years or so, people said, ‘Well, yeah, they’re great and small and cheap, but they don’t get good reliability.’

That myth has been broken because small satellites now have operational lifetimes of 10 years or more, depending on the orbits and what they’re trying to do. That’s been one of the key breakthroughs that’s allowed small satellites to sit right alongside the big satellite missions.”

Gabe Zimmerman, director of the in space product line at Ursa Major: “People want their satellites to work. They want their hardware to work. They want to be able to depend on it. It’s at the forefront of everything we do. And you’re worried about cost, shaving off a couple of dollars and risking a mission is generally a tradeoff that’s hard to do.

You want to have your cake and eat it too, but at the end of the day, I think reliability is going to win out. And so at Ursa Major, we’ve had seven successful flights. We’ve got a culture of testing often and early.

When you have hardware on the [exhibition show] floor, it really starts to communicate to our customers and to our competi-mates, that, hey, this is real stuff. It’s about putting stuff in people’s hands and showing them the value you’re adding. And that really is what does the communicating more than any single or immediate thing.”

The supply chain is a bottleneck … and an opportunity

Tom Walkinshaw, CEO and co-founder alba orbital: “During COVID, there were a bunch of issues like getting chips, and that seems to have largely resolved itself. I think the tariffs are obviously the current thing that’s really big.

Generally speaking, there’s a lot of uncertainty in the world and uncertainty is bad for business, and it just slows down operations. No one’s really sure what regime we’re going to be in. Obviously that’s not great, but it’s sort of just the way it is.”

Todd Master, chief operating officer, Umbra: “The real reason we announced our space systems business unit was in response to the challenges that we saw as a customer.
We talked about the component supply chain, and vendors that were available to us. They’re busy. The amount of investing going on from private capital and from proliferated constellations has really spiked. There were a lot of interested companies, like, ‘Hey, we’ve got a concept. And in a year or two, we might have this thing for you.’ And, we will move on a pretty tight developmental cycle … so we developed a lot of those things ourselves.

We’re going out into the marketplace to basically offer another choice to customers there. We believe we’ll be able to deliver in a really timely fashion, but the unique part that we bring to the table is the benefit of flight experience and flight knowledge.”

Zimmerman: “For a lot of people, there’s a long waitlist. Effectively, the lead time is long because a lot of people are buying stuff. So just [to] start off, the demand is there, right? And so if you don’t have your production equipment and processes set up, you just can’t respond as quickly.

That’s one big thing, and then the other thing is to shape the industry to say, ‘Hey, we understand there are mission level requirements, there are capabilities you want to have, but how do we align requirements to match hardware capabilities and meet in the middle?’ Because if everything is just a one-off or brand new, you’re going to have a hard time closing that gap, because you’re not going to be able to leverage as much of the hardware, the development, the testing.

For Ursa, we’ve done strategic vertical integration. There are vertical integration evangelists who say ‘everything has got to be us.’ We’re a lot more ‘We know what we’re really good at: propulsion, certain manufacturing methods.’ We want to bring those on site, but also work with partners, work with suppliers to leverage their expertise. And I think that’s how you build a more robust supply chain, not just by trying to gobble it up.”

The line between what is and isn’t a small satellite is blurring

Master: “I don’t know that mass is really going to define it. I think it’s going to be around, ‘What’s your development cycle like?’ ‘Does this need to be the mission that lasts for now and forever or is this a rapid technology refresh platform?’ And we recognize that that’s going to shift rapidly, and therefore, I don’t want to make a huge investment in any one satellite platform.

This is a continuing problem. The evolution that you’re seeing is because launch has become a lot more accessible, and we can put more things up more quickly, and rideshares become the norm. That really is what got us here. And I think it’s great, because it basically says, ‘we don’t have to define what the problem is going to be in three years and have a system that’s going to work through that.’ But I can solve this year’s problem this year and next year’s problem next year, and go from there.”

Zimmerman: “Maybe I would try to think less about a volume or a mass and more about an ability to mass produce, and the benefits you get from that mass production… and maybe that’s really where the line is.”

Sweeting: “If you now say that we’re not restricted by mass and launch costs, which Starship will actually remove, then perhaps the impetus for physically small satellites will also be removed… so it’ll be very interesting to see [a] smallsat in 10 years’ time. Is it actually a smallsat, or is it sort of something different? Or larger?”

Niche innovation may be the next survival strategy

Walkinshaw: “Obviously there’s a lot of people doing imaging businesses, and they’re very successful, and they’re all well known. We’re just trying to find a niche that we can serve.

We do a lot of nighttime imagery. That’s sort of the niche that we’re targeted towards. We have some contracts there. So that’s maybe a niche that we can do quite well with our satellite, but maybe other folks in the market aren’t really paying as much attention to. It’s trying to find a niche and find enough customers to make it worthwhile doing the activity.”

Master: “It’s probably unexpected for some people to see a company who’s starting with data move into components. But likewise I see companies that have components moving to systems…you’re just seeing a lot of ebb and flow.”

Zimmerman: “One thing that comes to mind would be more cutting-edge propulsion solutions. There’s a lot of benefits to chemical and there are a lot of benefits to electric, but how do those blend and mesh?”

This article first appeared in the September 2025 issue of SpaceNews Magazine.