The AttoSat Manifesto
AttoSats in orbit (Image: Enora Mercier)
Despite the advent of CubeSats, PocketQubes, and femto satellites, developing and launching a spacecraft still costs a fortune, the equivalent of buying a house. It also takes years to get from the initial concept to launch. This means that space exploration for education is still only accessible to few, well-equipped, well-funded universities.
We believe that space exploration will be accessible to much more people via much smaller spacecraft: AttoSats. AttoSats weigh less than 10 grams. AttoSats can drastically reduce the entry barrier to spacecraft development via:
- Drastically reducing development cost, cheaper than a smartphone;
- Drastically reducing launch cost via gram-sized spacecraft;
- Drastically reduce the time for development from years to months;
- Embrace risk-taking and quick iterations.
Andreas Hein
