Attendees at the recent Small Satellite Conference in Salt Lake City chat near a satellite exhibit. The event at the Salt Palace Convention Center attracted 5,500 people. (Brice Wallace/Salt Lake Business Journal)
Ahead of technical sessions with titles like "Leveraging Persistent L-band LEO-to-GEO Relays for the Orchestration of High-Bandwidth Optical Inter-Satellite Links," the kickoff of the recent Small Satellite Conference featured a call to have fun.
Conference Chair Pat Patterson, director of advanced concepts at Utah State University's Space Dynamics Laboratory, wanted the attendees to enjoy the growth of the event, marking its 40th year, and the industry itself.
At the first conference in 1987, the industry was "just barely starting to take shape, and our community was few in number," Patterson told the crowd at the Salt Palace Convention Center in Salt Lake City. The first day of that first event in Logan attracted only 45 people.
"The discussion around technology was, of course, a little bit simpler than it is today. Nothing was grand or complex in any way. … In the early days, it was about professors and students and amateur radio enthusiasts, and SmallSat was truly a small and simple gathering."
Side meetings at that event took place at a bar. Chats took place over card tables. The opening social and other events took place at a campground.
In contrast, the event has ballooned to 5,500 attendees, and discussions often focus on "constellations" of satellites in space "and not have it be science fiction but have it be reality," Patterson said.
"Since then, though, you all have completely transformed our industry into something magical," he said. "It is no longer crazy to talk about flying dozens or hundreds or even thousands of satellites and having them all function together, to be having them collect massive amounts of data, bounce data back and forth between those satellites, process that data somewhere on orbit, and then pass the data down to the ground to an end user, with latencies measured in milliseconds."
Gurpartap "GP" Sandhoo delivers an address at the recent Small Satellite Conference in Salt Lake City. Sandhoo is director of the Space Development Agency and Space Force portfolio acquisition executive for missile warning and tracking. (Brice Wallace/Salt Lake Business Journal)
In contrast to the celebratory tone, Gurpartap "GP" Sandhoo's opening keynote focused on the importance of satellite technology in detecting and tracking missiles for U.S. defense. Sandhoo is director of the Space Development Agency and Space Force portfolio acquisition executive for missile warning and tracking.
For its part, the Space Development Agency has launched three groups of satellites into low Earth orbit to track advanced missile threats so that warfighters can react quickly. The group will provide initial warfighting capability beginning in 2027, with the constellation eventually consisting of a total of 154 operational satellites.
The threats by potential adversaries are on the rise, he said. For example, the number of ICBMs available in China, Russia, North Korea and Iran is currently about 760 but could reach 1,200 by 2035. Land attack cruise missiles in Russia and China now total about 1,600 but could rise to over 10,000 by 2035. For both aeroballistic missiles and hypersonic glide vehicles, China and Russia have a combined 900 but could see that reach 5,000 by 2035.
"The number of missiles and threats that are out there — the volume, the ferocity, the velocity of these things — continues to go up," Sandhoo said. "All you have to do is look at the news to [see] what's going on, the number of missiles that are getting launched every single day. How do you deal with this? They are in the air domain, they are in the space domain, and they are all headed at the joint force and homeland defense."
The missiles and systems "are only going to get faster, they're going to get dimmer, they're going to pull more Gs," he said, requiring satellites to detect and track them quickly so that U.S. forces can react in time.
At one time during Operation Desert Storm, he recalled, enemy weapons were so poor that they either broke up in the skies or missed their targets. As a result, the safest place for people to be was at headquarters buildings that were being targeted.
"Guess what? That is no longer the case," Sandhoo said. "These missiles have evolved so much in the last 10, 12 years. They don't break up. They hit the target almost every single time. … We have to make sure that we can detect these things, we can track these things, we can hit them before they come down."
