Atlantic Council - SMALL SATELLITES: - THE IMPLICATIONS FOR NATIONAL SECURITY - by Nicholas Eftimiades

The Center honors General Brent Scowcroft’s legacy of service and embodies his ethos of nonpartisan commitment to the cause of security, support for US leadership in cooperation with allies and partners, and dedication to the mentorship of the next generation of leaders. [...] The Department of Defense (DoD) and the Intelligence of which are organizational behavior, the government’s Community (IC) are trying to take advantage of the lack of understanding of commercial markets, outdated small-satellite revolution. [...] by 27.9 percent.7 If just half of those commercial space proposals are successful, the space traffic created would Over the last two decades, advancements in aerospace more than double the number of satellites deployed over microelectronics and new business models of space the last sixty years, and create more than six times the launch have allowed for the launch of tens of thousands number of act. [...] Another positive disruption of small satellites for the Department of Defense is the potential to have secondary The increase in numbers of inexpensive small satellites is payloads added to US or (potentially) allied commercial a form of resilience, reducing the effectiveness of foreign spacecraft. [...] ● Space-system owners and operators should col- To develop the required ground infrastructure, the Defense laborate to promote the development of best Innovation Unit contracted Ball Aerospace and Microsoft practices and mitigations, to the extent permit- to demonstrate how cloud processing could handle the ted by law and regulation.