Do We Need a Million Satellites in Orbit? Constellation-as-a-Service with Modular Satellites: Challenges and Opportunities

In this paper, we argue that deploying many mission-specific satellite mega-constellations incurs significant monetary and environmental costs. Instead, we propose launching a single or a small number of mega-constellations equipped with heterogeneous computing, communication, storage, and sensing capabilities, allowing them to offer a broad range of services to customers who no longer need to launch their own satellites. We argue that the hardware technology for building such platforms is already widely accessible. Thus, we highlight the algorithmic and systems challenges that the community needs to address to enable cost-efficient and secure constellation-as-a-service platforms. We also develop a simulator that allows for experimenting with different scheduling algorithms for constellation-as-a-service platforms.