SatNews

Satellite Industry Intelligence Since 1983

Business & Finance

The Benign Era is Over: Why the Commercial Space Sector Just Woke Up on the Front Lines

February 11, 2026 / Business & Finance

Dispatch from SmallSat Symposium. For the past decade the SmallSat industry operated under a comforting delusion that low Earth orbit was a sanctuary where commercial operators could move fast, break things, and prioritize automotive-grade electronics over military-grade hardening. Dr. Paul Struhsaker, CEO of Arrasar Partners, with the precision of the former NSA intelligence analyst and Navy submarine officer that he is, exposed and dismantled that illusion during the session Orbital Assets: Contested and Congested.

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D2D’s Hype Hangover: The Physics Finally Bite Back

February 10, 2026 / Business & Finance

Dispatch from SmallSat Symposium. The free drinks at SmallSat Symposium usually signal a celebration, but this year they feel more like a necessity. If 2024 was the year of the press release, early 2026 is the year of the hangover. Breathless promises of ubiquitous, high-speed connectivity from space have collided with a formidable wall of physics, finance, and federal regulation.

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Silicon Valley to Aerospace: Code is the New Steel

February 10, 2026 / Business & Finance

Dispatch from SmallSat Symposium. Rockets still make a lot of noise, but the revolution visible at the SmallSat Symposium moves silently, digitally, and at the speed of code. For decades “metal benders”—those massive aerospace conglomerates that first weld titanium and then figure out the flight computer—have defined the space industry. That era is officially obsolete.

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The New Orbital Guard: Commercial Tech Steps Up as the Pentagon’s Watchtower

February 10, 2026 / Business & Finance

Dispatch from SmallSat Symposium. The mood at the SmallSat Symposium has shifted from anxiety to resolve. While previous years were defined by fear of orbital overcrowding, this year marks the moment the industry decided to act. Experts at the Space Domain Awareness panel officially retired the “Big Sky” theory, the old assumption that space is too vast for collisions to matter. Yet panic did not replace this outdated concept. Instead, a sophisticated, militarized professionalism has taken command.

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The New Space Playbook Faces a Physics Cliff at the Moon

February 10, 2026 / Business & Finance

Dispatch from SmallSat Symposium. For the past decade, the commercial space sector has benefited from a benign era defined by a quiescent sun and the protective magnetosphere of Low Earth Orbit (LEO). This stability allowed companies to prioritize speed and commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components over traditional radiation hardening. Yet, as the industry pivots toward sustained lunar operations under the Artemis program, engineers face a steep physics cliff. The fail-operational strategies that built the LEO economy simply cannot withstand the harsh radiation environment of deep space.

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The Commercial Mask Slips: Space is Now a Sovereign Arms Race

February 10, 2026 / Business & Finance

Dispatch from SmallSat Symposium. The polite fiction that the commercial space industry exists primarily for crop yields and climate monitoring has ended. During the symposium’s Future of Geospatial Intelligence session, industry titans stopped pretending their product is intended for sale to NGOs, admitting they are instead building a new global backbone for national defense.

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