The New Space Playbook Faces a Physics Cliff at the Moon
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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