At MILSPACE 2009 Karyn Hayes-Ryan, Associate Chief Operating Officer of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) offered that CubeSats might be the next transforming innovation in space development primarily because they offer a means for rapidly maturing new technologies to ultimately be used by larger NRO intelligence gathering satellites. The vision of CubeSats as technology demonstration platforms will only be realized when their data downlink capability matches their data acquisition capability. At the moment, CubeSat communications are extremely limited. To boost communications, they need more power and they need to focus and aim that power in the form of directed transmissions. Beyond the "CubeSat as a test and demonstration platform" model, the information developed under the proposed study would inform Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) mission planners considering the use of small agile satellites in the 3 to 50 kg range. The TORC-SP system is a scalable and rapidly reconfigurable ACS for CubeSats; allowing fast, low-cost, on-demand agile ACS development.
Small satellites which are low cost and can be delivered in months (as opposed to years), are being eyed as platforms for rapid demonstration of new technologies (e.g., new propulsion, communications, power collection and MEMS technologies) and even important science missions (e.g., earth and space climate observation, biological sciences). From NASA's recently launched PharmaSat sub-10 kg free-flying nanosatellite, which has just successfully completed an experiment that could help scientists better understand how effectively drugs work in space, to potential future missions like the Reef Ecosystem Spectro-Photometric Observatory (CRESPO), a ~100 kg microsatellite that will use a hyperspectral imager (HSI) to monitor the condition of more than 50% of the Earth's coral reefs over a 2-year period, NASA is counting on these small satellites to deliver.
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