New Space Era: Moore’s Law in Action

Due to the inevitable advance of technology during the last decades, the space industry has been developing and it is recently showing an abrupt growth such that, as it is widely referred, the world is entering a new space era.

One of the aspects of this growth shows itself in the form of miniaturization: that is, systems of any level (i.e. those who host electronic devices) are able to perform equally or better than before at much-reduced sizes and masses. This applies to technology in general, and it is an asset in every field. It is evident that space engineering benefits from this evolution, but in this case the advantage is even clearer, as the main obstacle for space may, in fact, be mass. In the space market, mass affects directly and greatly the cost of a mission: usually, both the cost estimations for space systems and the cost for a payload to be orbited are carried out and refer in terms of mass. For instance, a kg of payload costs an average of 50.000$.

Space technology is therefore at a great advantage by exploiting this phenomenon, and the industry is moving every day faster into the miniaturization direction. Systems and platform are evolving towards smaller sizes and masses, becoming cheaper and easier to handle: a good example of this are CubeSats. These standardized platforms allow reducing a whole satellite to units of 10x10x10 cm^3 for little more than 1 kg, reducing design, manufacturing, and launch costs. Therefore, such systems and platforms are becoming easier to obtain and more frequent.

Consequently, space knowledge is spreading and the number of missions is increasing for services, science, and education (e.g. microgravity experiments). Launch vehicles have more payload to launch, but a smaller mass to carry.

For these reasons, even the launchers are being reduced in mass and size and they have place to grow in accordance with the new space economy introduced: since the cost is directly affected by the mass, launchers are becoming cheaper and so is the market price of a space mission. Further optimizations into the economic factor consist of off-the-shelf subsystems, materials and manufacturing, and re-utilization (i.e. re-entry technology)

However, this increase in a number of space platforms easily converts into an increase of space the number of debris: an alarming part of the objects inserted into an orbit becomes junk, which is an exponential hazard for future space missions from different points of view; junk that needs to be removed.

It is foreseen that in the near future, the number of small satellites will rise enormously (more and more often forming constellations): this determines not only an increase in the number of launches but also in space debris. Accordingly, to these needs, plans are emerging in regard to mitigating the number of debris by developing collecting and de-orbiting technology.

Levitas aims to meet these expectations and adapt to the new space economy by designing and developing a new, dedicated microsat launcher with flexible, updated launch schedule: research would be focused on the aforementioned major points such as miniaturized, reusable and de-orbiting technology and the development would be carried out at an optimal cost. The launcher will, therefore, include re-entry systems and an orbital module for the removal of space
debris