You just watched our forecast about what we thought CubeSat reality would be like in the year 2020. Let's catch up with actual reality and see what is going on with CubeSat today. How popular are they? How many have been launched? What does it cost today to launch one? And let's see what kinds of innovations and strategic decisions have been made by people who were paying attention to CubeSat from the beginning. So here are some updates, when we created the forecast only 100 cubesats had ever been launched. As of today there have been over 2,000 cubesats launched. So maybe not a global phenomenon yet, but the trend is continuing, and there are more, and more cubesats being launched than ever before. The price point has been reduced, when we made the forecast it cost $40,000 to get a cubesat into space. Now the lowest price point available is $8,000 not $99 like in the forecast. But certainly, a move in the direction of more affordable access to space. When we made the forecast 100% of cubesats were being launched by academic researchers, grad students, undergrads working on teams scientists working in University Labs. Today, ten years later, less than half of cubesat launches our academic and it's actually expanded quite a bit outward. Where a majority are now commercial projects and amateur projects by people who are just interested in touching space, but don't have any kind of formal academic or research affiliation. They are going places, we did not anticipate at the time cubesats could only be launched into Earth's orbit. But cubesats are actually now being planned to send be sent to other planets cubesat for Mars cubesat for Jupiter. So this has gone somewhere, we had no idea it would go. There also being used to think about asteroid deflection and detection when we did our expanded forecast. This was one of the Innovation areas that we suggested seemed really promising that one of the best uses of cubesats would be to monitor space debris to see what might be coming in a trajectory towards Earth so that we would have more time to deflect an asteroid and that is actually one of the current use cases by governments and by space scientists. So that is actually happened. There have been a number of legal challenges to cubesats. So even though they were designed to be launched by anyone. It seems that some companies have taken this a little too literally and just recently the United States government sued some private commercial launches for not putting Information into some official state registry it turns out that right now cubesats do need to be registered with the government so they can know everything that's being sent into space and some companies are claiming free space, right? So just launch whatever they want whenever they want. So there's a kind of legal challenge that's being looked at today. That was a part of our longer forecast was thinking about how this would call into question who owns space who monitors base who governs base who regulate space and that is turning into a really thorny topic that's still being figured out today a couple of the things that we've seen from from groups that engage with our early research. We're seeing that a number of satellite manufacturers have gone through major restructuring some to focus on smaller navigational and smaller building components to essentially compete with the cubesat phenomenon. Some companies have had massive layoffs because it turns out people don't want to build as large a satellite anymore that this is a phenomenon that's affecting the entire satellite industry not just amateurs. And so that's been an interesting business Trend to see the companies that started to evolve and adapt sooner to keep sets have been more successful and one of the big adoptions of cubesats that we've seen that I like to think our forecast had a little something to do with is that governments are using cubesats and a cubesat strategy to increase their space resilience. So if major satellites were knocked out intentionally by a bad actor by an adversarial nation and that would compromise our internet our surveillance or security that the government would be able to launch swarms of cubesats to replace that quickly and Portably. So that's been an interesting thing to track mean the upshot of all of this is that cubesats are still an emerging space 10 years later. One of the strange things about thinking like a futurist is we're always trying to get there early but I have found in my career we get there too early. We have so much for a site that the things we we anticipate happening in 10 years often take 15 or 20 years to play out. I've seen that again and again, so what that often means, is that a forecast from 10 years ago. You just dig it back up update it with some new information and it's still actually a really useful tool to look ahead into the future. I would certainly be willing to make a forecast for 2030 that looks a lot like the forecast we made for 2020 where we will see more and more actors getting involved in space Innovation and space exploration and this technology continues to advance so that we will be democratizing. Who gets to participate in space? So that's one Journey Back To The Past to Look Back to the Future and hopefully gives you an idea that you can you can be free and flexible in your forecast. They're not binding contracts. You can come back and look at them and update them and revise them and revisit them. I invite you to bring creativity and flexibility to it. Just as we always try to do here at the Institute.
