European Space Governance
Initiative/Center for Security
Studies
The Military Use of Small Satellites
in Orbit
Mariel BOROWITZ
Key Takeaways
Small satellites offer unique economic
opportunities, due to their shorter
development time, their lower cost as
well as their manufacturing in assembly
line style processes.
Many small satellite applications envision
systems comprised of constellations of
hundreds or thousands of satellites, which
offer a number of advantages, such as the
increase in temporal resolution, or revisit
rate, as well as formation flying.
Military users can take advantage
of commercial systems for military
purposes – leveraging existing capability
without the need to develop new systems
internally. Militaries must look for ways to
harness these trends to their advantage,
both by making use of commercial
offerings, and by examining military-
specific opportunities.
Military leaders envision a time when
battlefield imagery could be requested
and received by commanders on the
ground and used for real-time decision-
making. The U.S. Army’s Project
Convergence experimented with this
capability in October 2020.
