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Challenges

The NewSpace revolution

Traditionally the preserve of the major space agencies, access to space opened up to a whole new panorama of players at the end of the 20th century with the advent of the NewSpace movement. This new approach, with its emphasis on lower costs, shorter deadlines and faster technological development, is making space more accessible and the range of players involved more diverse. The way in which space projects are conceived has been completely rethought, allowing greater risk-taking, which is a definite catalyst for technological innovation.

This development offers a number of very attractive advantages to the private sector, enabling companies of all sizes to emerge with innovative technological systems at every stage, and investors to position themselves in strategic areas. NewSpace thus represents a real economic and commercial challenge for both suppliers and customers, who can develop projects at competitive rates.

With NewSpace, a trend has naturally emerged: the miniaturisation of satellites, or in other words, nanosatellites. Sometimes assembled in cubes (or units) of 10cm on each side – in these cases we speak of cubesats, whose size is referenced in units (1U = 1 cube of 10cm3) – nanosatellites are more generally satellites weighing less than 50kg.

The development of nanosatellite programmes

While the majority of university nanosatellites developed over the past two decades have been primarily for educational purposes, scientific research nanosatellite projects have been appearing on the scene in recent years in France and around the world on a wide range of topics (climate, exoplanets, space situational awareness, terrestrial magnetism, stellar physics, radio astronomy, etc.). This growing interest can also be seen among space agencies, which in recent years have funded projects and even launched nanosatellite programmes. This is the case of ESA, for example, which in 2016 launched a call for tenders for nanosatellites to accompany the HERA probe, designed to study in situ the results of the impact of NASA’s DART spacecraft – itself having released the LICIACube nanosatellite – on the Dimorphos asteroid. Since then, ESA has been considering nanosatellites to accompany its exploration missions. One of the benefits of this policy has been that many countries have been able to launch space activities using nanosatellites, with the support of ESA and national agencies (Luxembourg, Estonia, Poland, etc.). At the same time, ESA is creating dedicated programme (Fly Your Satellite, ESA Academy, etc.) and projects in existing programmes (M-ARGO in the General Support Technology Programme). Meanwhile, NASA is including nanosatellites, some of them scientific, in almost all its launches, and is also funding dedicated launches. In Japan, the Japanese space agency JAXA is launching JAXA-SMASH (Small satellite rush programme) in 2023, a research and development programme designed to encourage universities and private companies to collaborate on the development of nanosatellites. 

While these major space agencies show an understanding of the revolution taking place in the space sector and demonstrate a real desire to develop nanosatellites, France, via CNES, remains somewhat timid. CNES did launch the Janus and then the Nanolab Academy nanosatellite programmes, but until then its policy had been purely educational. What’s more, France contributes very little to the funding of ESA’s nanosatellite programmes. As a result, despite the dynamism of the scientific communities involved, the many young researchers and engineers trained in nanosatellite technologies, and the existence of a multitude of French scientific nanosatellite projects, these remain in unfair competition with the instruments onboard traditional missions, and very few of them have access to funding or to the human and material resources of laboratories. More broadly speaking, France does not have a notable legacy of contributions to European scientific nanosatellites either, as French contributions stop at the level of the HERA parent mission.

Need for a dedicated national programme

One thing is clear: the scientific nanosatellite sector in France suffers cruelly from the absence of a specific national programme, as exists elsewhere in the world. In the absence of such a dedicated window, project managers have to put together a complex budget by seeking funding from multiple sources (regions, ANR, ERC, universities, etc.), with widely varying conditions and timetables, and by combining numerous small grants to reach the overall budget required. This situation has a number of unfortunate consequences, the most crucial of which is that there is permanent uncertainty over the development plan for the projects, which leads to obvious management difficulties and total development times that are in blatant contradiction with the very challenges of New Space. What’s more, many projects find themselves having to scale back their ambitions, sometimes even making them more complex, depending on the funding available. In this context, it is impossible to propose an optimised overall scientific strategy at the level of the Nanosats Federation, even though this synergy effect is a major expectation of its members.

For all these reasons, Fédération Nanosats is strongly in favour of setting up a national scientific nanosatellite programme, with a recurrent budget, ideally managed by CNES, and operating on the principle of annual calls for tender. To be effective, this programme would need a budget sufficient to finance the launch of at least one nanosatellite per year at national level, i.e. around €3 to 5 million per year. This budget would represent between €30m and €50m over the decade, or the equivalent of an average scientific contribution to space research, with an impact 10 times greater and a new scientific and technological impulse. It would also be a real inspiration for young engineers and researchers trained in the training programmes of university space centres and CNES educational programmes.

In addition to the Scout Earth observation programme, and so that French teams can respond to ESA calls for tender, France should contribute to ESA’s nanosatellite programmes, such as the General Support Technology Programme and VOLT, as several European countries are already doing.