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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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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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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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Dispatch from SmallSat Symposium. If the mood at past SmallSat Symposiums was defined by exuberant experimentation, this year feels different. The energy has not vanished, but it has matured. During the session Engineering the Future Spacecraft, a clear signal emerged from the noise: the industry is graduating. Focus has shifted from the novelty of New Space to the serious, high-stakes business of national infrastructure and defense.
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Dispatch from SmallSat Symposium. Attendees at the SmallSat Symposium might have envisioned a future Space Data Layer as a seamless optical-mesh network capable of near-instant data transmission. During the symposium’s Edge of Orbit session, however, participants scrutinized the mechanics available to make that ideal materialize quickly. Attendees backed off from that theoretical end-state to debate the practical complexities and significant labor required to make this revolution operational.
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Dispatch from SmallSat Symposium. The age of PowerPoint architecture has passed. For five years, the Space Development Agency operated as the Pentagon’s rebellious startup, promising to deliver a Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture faster than the establishment could draft a requirements document. At the SmallSat Symposium, however, no celebratory mood pervaded the SDA Vision: Pacing Evolving Threats session. Instead, a sober atmosphere prevailed as SDA’s ambitions met the friction of reality.
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Dispatch from SmallSat Symposium: The era of the slide-deck billionaire is dead. Attendees entering the Small Satellites: Trends and Opportunities session expecting standard futurism about connecting the unconnected or democratizing the stars were likely disappointed. The mood at SmallSat Symposium has shifted from gold-rush optimism to the cold calculus of a fortress under construction.
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At the SmallSat Symposium in Silicon Valley on February 10, 2026, Kongsberg Satellite Services (KSAT) unveiled the Hyperion mission, a pivotal demonstration intended to move its HYPER in-orbit relay constellation […]
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On February 9, 2026, Momentus Inc. announced it has entered into a Space Act Agreement with NASA to execute a groundbreaking in-orbit servicing and rendezvous demonstration mission. Scheduled for launch […]
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Kepler Communications has successfully launched the first operational tranche of its next-generation optical data relay constellation. The mission, carried out aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force […]
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