How Smallsats Could Make a Big Difference for NASA and NOAA

Published: Jan. 23, 2018, 4:31 p.m.

Information from space has historically been the province of the rich and powerful. Big Earth-observing satellites can cost hundreds of millions of dollars to build and launch, and the price of their data scales accordingly. Scrappy scientific upstarts have, for a while, been building smallsats to get orbital data on the cheap.