Open Source, Smallsat Software and Eating Space

The smallsat market continues to grow rapidly spurred by venture capital investments and by technological innovation. Over 300 small satellites were launched in 2017 and 679 could be launched by 2022 according to SpaceWorks Engineering. With us today is a person at the heart of this industry transformation that is helping to make this vision a reality. Marshall Culpepper is the CEO and CTO of Kubos, a venture backed start-up that is building the first comprehensive software platform for the satellite industry. He discusses how critical software is to space and smallsat operations and the value of the open source community. Marshall discusses how their software is different from the GEO operating systems and how it takes advantage of the cloud to not only store data, but to virtualize execution of the operations of a satellite. He sees a very important role for software in the years to come in its ability to virtually allocate capacity on both sensors and communications capacity on the satellite.