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Comment by samhuk | Hacker News Reader

I'm unfamiliar with the innards of the cubesat industry, but one question I have had for a while is are there any players out there offering CaaS (Cubesat as a Service)? E.g. A company sends up a bunch of cubesats, each with a variety of instrument suites, and then essentially timeshares them on some web platform.

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It's not good enough to just send something up and have at it as a customer. Any High school with enough money for an off the shelf kit can do that, snap a picture and write home for the bragging rights. But due to the constraints of energy, volume, distance and other factors you'll just end up with a quality result no better or worse than what you could get from a much cheaper weather balloon just with less logistics to worry about.

Until rockets get a lot cheaper, (come on Starship, deliver on your promise) to get a result that is commercially viable from such a timeshare option, you need to tailor your payload to deliver an outcome that can be actually desired. Everything is a trade off, and until the satellites get 5-10x cheaper to launch again, you're under very tight constraints and you truly have to trade off every other aspect (wavelength, sensor type, resolution, power level, communication budget, mass budget, geographic spread/location, orbital height) to get one good specific outcome in a 10x10x10cm form factor. Yes, you can fit mobile phone electronics in these things. But they are usually 200km+ away from what they need to measure. Until consumer off the shelf electronics can give you the sensor readings you need from an entire country distance away, the requirements is still going to need an act of true cutting edge engineering if your goal is to operate for-profit.

This is not impossible mind you, the industry will continue to mature. But it's a world of the future, not a world of the present.

I think these folks did that: https://www.kubos.com/

yeah, but they pivoted to ground-station based software instead of true in flight services and got bought for their ground component piece of the equation. The business plan as originally that entailed didn't work out. Just too early to the game IMO rather than a bad idea. But the market dynamics that they were under in the 2016-2019 era are still today mostly the same market dynamics in 2022.

I have to give a shoutout to my friends literally down the street who do this: German Orbital Systems [1] + EXOLAUNCH [2].

Then there's also some other companies who make the satellite bus and other parts for CubeSats like GOMspace [3] and NanoAvionics [4] (it looks like they have started doing launch and mission ops as well).

[1] https://www.orbitalsystems.de/

[2] https://exolaunch.com/

[3] https://gomspace.com/home.aspx

[4] https://nanoavionics.com/

I would imagine the problem with this model is that there isn't actually a whole lot you can do if you rent time on a satellite. Given an orbiting sensor suite, all you can do is log the sensor data and send it back to earth - you can't really run experiments or anything. So the company that owns the satellites can do that, and then try to . . . sell the data? That's basically the business model. That works for satellite imaging companies, but what other sensors might that work for? And how many paying customers could you reasonably have?

You can run ML algorithms on imagery in space, and do a bit more than just downlink sensor data. There is already one satellite that works as such an experimental platform:

https://www.groundstation.space/esa-funds-12-new-experiment-...

Is there that much instrumentation looking outwards or inwards that would be useful enough on scale to have this sort of service? If you look at services like QuickBird you can get high res meter resolution satellite imagery pretty cheap. A lot cheaper than renting a satellite yourself.

Yes? We are trying to do exactly that, but haven't raised enough money yet.

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