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Small satellite

A spacecraft in the roughly 1 to 500 kg class, built to be cheap and quick to produce rather than individually exquisite.

Why it matters

Small satellites changed who gets to fly. When a spacecraft costs a few hundred thousand dollars instead of hundreds of millions, a university, a startup or a small national agency can own one, and losing one is a setback rather than a catastrophe. That tolerance for failure is the real shift: it allows iteration, commercial off-the-shelf parts and short development cycles. The trade-off is capability per spacecraft, which is why small satellites usually make sense in numbers rather than alone.

In our data

The dependency on shared rides is visible in our manifest: the rideshare flights we track go overwhelmingly to sun-synchronous orbit, which accounts for 36 of 350 missions. Rocket Lab, the provider built specifically around smaller payloads, appears 30 times - second among Western commercial providers.

Missions we track
Where we use it
Not to be confused with

A CubeSat, which is one standardised format within the small-satellite class, built from 10 cm units. Every CubeSat is a small satellite; most small satellites are not CubeSats.

Related
RideshareSatellite constellationLaunch vehicle