Revolutionary Next Generation Small Satellite Communications Missions and Architectures

This paper describes revolutionary next generation small satellite communications missions and architectures. The satellite communications revolution background, current GSO's, 'Little', 'Big' and 'Broadband' LEO's, and enabling satellite technologies are briefly discussed. Converging technological and economic forces drive us inevitably to the next decade's communication satellite systems and network architectures. The increasing pace of new capabilities, Moore's law, and convergence of key technologies over the next few years provide the next generation satellite revolution 'push', while the global and local commercial communications demand/economics, orbit slot and spectrum scarcity, rapidly dropping communications costs, privatization, multiple market entries and competitive shakeouts provide the 'pull'. The result of these forces is a rapid evolution of communications satellites and network architectures that will depart significantly from today's GSO and LEO systems. The revolutionary next generation architectural paradigms for distributed space systems is described. New system architectures are predicted for GSO's (clusters), LEO's (multi-mission constellations, clusters), and the next waves (interlinked hybrid networks, Aerostat 'stratospheric GSO' platforms, and the trends to clusters of large thin satellites).