Top Stories From the 2025 SmallSat Symposium
 | | This week, SpaceNews journalists are reporting from the SmallSat Symposium, held in Mountain View, California. We'll be bringing highlights to your inbox — for full coverage, go to SpaceNews.com.
| | | | | By Jeff Foust, Feb. 6, 2025 | | | | | Space startups have long been urged not to try to complete directly with the industry's current behemoth, SpaceX, but investors and others recommend new ventures not try to emulate its way of doing business as well.
SpaceX's dominance in the launch market means there's little room for new entrants, particularly given the track record other startups have had in the sector, said investors and startup executives during a panel at the Smallsat Symposium Feb. 5.
"No offense to the 183 launch companies that I'm tracking on my website, but that's not the future of the space industry," said Meagan Crawford, founder and managing partner of SpaceFund, a venture capital fund that offers databases of companies in the launch industry and other sectors. "The question is, what's being launched?" Read More
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More News From the SmallSat Symposium | | | | | Investors advise caution in defense-focused space boom By Sandra Erwin Venture capitalists in the space industry are witnessing a shift in investment trends as startups once urged to focus on commercial markets increasingly pivot toward defense and intelligence applications to attract funding. However, industry veterans caution against chasing defense dollars without proper consideration. "Your mission is to build a product or service that adds value to someone. Don't get caught up in fads," Raphael Roettgen, founding partner of E2MC, warned, drawing parallels to the 1990s internet bubble. Read More
Iridium exploring small satellites to advance PNT capabilities By Jason Rainbow Iridium Communications is looking into using small satellites to demonstrate advanced Positioning, Navigation and Timing (PNT) capabilities, CEO Matt Desch said Feb. 4 during the Smallsat Symposium. "Maybe we need to be in the smallsat business for a while," Desch mused, "even in just an experimental stage [putting up] a few satellites." Read More
From routine to novel: Applications at the intersection of space and AI By Debra Werner Space startups are continuing to explore applications for artificial intelligence, from large language models to neural networks. A ChatGPT bot, for example, reads Orbital Sidekick's Slack channel because "one of the hardest things for us was keeping track of where and when the datasets for customers were coming through," said Tushar Prabhakar, Orbital Sidekick chief operating officer and co-founder, said Feb. 4 at the SmallSat Symposium. "We can ask [the bot] questions and it alerts us when a dataset is here." In the future, Orbital Sidekick executives expect large language models to help analyze historical data. Customers that rely on Orbital Sidekick to monitor oil and gas pipelines could see where and when previous leaks occurred. Read More | | | | What's New With SpaceNews? |  | | Check out the latest episode of our new podcast, Space Minds. Join David Ariosto, Mike Gruss and journalists from the SpaceNews team for compelling interviews with scientists, founders and experts who love to talk about space, and their takes on the week's biggest news.
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