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Care needs to be taken with military kit, but America’s regulations still seem excessive. A regular review to distinguish between systems that pose a real threat and ones that don’t would be a help, as would better intelligence. Tight restrictions on new technologies will not work, and will damage America’s interests: exciting new ventures like nanosats will simply move to countries from which they can be launched with greater ease. Back to top Nanosatellites: Nanosats are go! The Economist ALTHOUGH widely used, satellites are expensive to build and to launch. That began to change last year. On November 19th Orbital Sciences, an American company, launched a rocket from the Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. It carried 29 satellites aloft and released them into low-Earth orbit, a record for a single mission. Thirty hours later, Kosmotras, a Russian joint-venture, carried 32 satellites into a similar orbit. Then, in January 2014, Orbital Sciences carried 33 satellites up to the International Space Station (ISS), where they were cast off a month later. Many of these 94 satellites were built in a standard format known as a CubeSat, a 10cm (4 inch) cube weighing 1.3kg (2.9lb) or less. Some comprised units of two or three cubes. After a decade of fits and starts, during which some 75 CubeSats were launched, satellites of this scale and other small satellites are moving from being experimental kit to delivering useful scientific data and commercial services. In the next five years or so some 1,000 nanosats, as small satellites of 1-10kg are called, are expected to be launched. Some will be smaller than a CubeSat; others bigger and heavier. Some are like a matryoshka doll: the Russian launch included a satellite that launched eight smaller ones, including four PocketQubes (a 5cm cube format). One of these smaller satellites, developed in Peru, released its own tiny bird. There will be upsets along the way. In April, as part of a mission by SpaceX, an American company, to resupply the ISS, a small mothership was placed in orbit carrying 104 “sprites” (pictured below). Not much larger than a postage stamp, these contain all the basic elements of a satellite, such as a radio, aerials, a solar cell and instruments. Developed as part of a crowd-funded project called KickSat at Cornell University, each sprite cost just $25 in parts. Their launch was free, courtesy of NASA, the American space agency. The sprites were designed to remain in orbit for a few weeks collecting data before burning up on re-entry. Unfortunately, due to a fault with a timer, the mothership failed to release them before it burned up on re-entry. A second mission is now being planned. No going back Despite that setback, the way ahead for satellite technology is clear. “You can now, with a single chip, create most of the capabilities that you would have found in Sputnik, but, of course, orders of magnitude faster,” says Mason Peck, a former chief technologist at NASA and now a professor at Cornell University. The most ambitious project to date is a flock of 28 nanosats, each one three CubeSats in size (ie, 30cm long). These were carried to the ISS in January and released in batches (pictured at the beginning of this article) through a sort of satellite shooter developed by NanoRacks, an American company. These nanosats came from Planet Labs, a firm based in San Francisco. The satellites now take pictures as they scan the Earth more frequently than traditional ones and at a fraction of the cost, albeit at a lower resolution. Planet Labs, funded modestly with $65m of private investment, says its nanosats provide much of the performance of a conventional satellite for a fraction of the cost. That reflects a lot of antiquated technology in the space business, much of which can be bettered by the latest off-the-shelf equipment, says Will Marshall, Planet Labs’ boss. There are other cost-saving measures. Satellites are usually built in elaborate clean rooms, but Planet Labs assembles its nanosats in “clean-enough’” rooms in its downtown offices. The company expects to put another 100 nanosats into orbit in the next 12 to 18 months. A few miles away, in another modest San Francisco office, Nanosatisfi is working on its ArduSats. These are open- source platforms and two have already gone up. They will contain an array of sensors and can carry out various missions, such as locating things. More than 250,000 ships, for instance, now broadcast an automatic identification signal than carries about 50 nautical miles. A fleet of small satellites in low orbit could pick up these signals and provide frequent updates about the ships’ positions without the vessels having to use costly dedicated satellite uplinks. Such a system might have been able to track Malaysian Airlines flight MH370, which went missing in March. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028509