An Engineer's Guide To Disrupting The Galaxy

Natalya Bailey’s tiny engines could change the economics of space exploration, much as the jet engine altered commercial air travel

 

- Kyle Stock

There’s a sweet spot about 22,000 miles above the planet. Only in this narrow band of space can an object achieve geosynchronous orbit, moving at the same speed as Earth’s rotation and staying fixed above one point on the surface. It’s beachfront real estate in the void.

This part of space came of age with the baby boomers in the 1960s. It’s been dominated by the few governments, aerospace giants, and telecoms with enough money and expertise to build a complex SUV-size object and lob it almost a tenth of the way to the moon. Everything in this stratum is highly planned and expensive; a satellite here can cost more than $300 million to produce.

Far below, at an elevation of about 370 miles, is the cheaper and riskier near-Earth orbit that has matured in step with millennials. It’s a free-floating, unruly mess populated by a new generation of miniature satellites that can be as small as toys and made for as little as $10,000. Already, they’re being stuffed aboard launch rockets like Tic Tacs.

The falling cost of building space tech and putting it into orbit has entrepreneurs, researchers, and oil- tankertracking hedge fund analysts lining up to claim their corner of the upper atmosphere. About one-third of the 4,600 man-made objects in Earth orbit went up in the past decade, including a record 553 last year, according to the United Nations.