**5. The disruption of New Space in broadband telecommunications**

Nowadays, the New Space concept is becoming an important trend that different countries leverage to encourage and promote space activities in their society. Due to the large number of new concepts associated with this movement, it is difficult to properly define the New Space trend. Authors in [11] try to clarify this concept by performing a survey of different researches. Their study concludes that this new trend is characterized by a set of key traits: (1) the apparition of new private entities that deploy novel satellite architectures in front of the traditional national space agencies; (2) novel development procedures that simplify and reduce the cost of the manufacturing of space products; and (3) the technology development is performed to always satisfy customer needs. These traits are associated with research of novel technologies related to satellite autonomy, miniaturization, satellite platforms, and crowd.

This current technological landscape would not be possible without the emergence of the CubeSat platforms [25]. This well-founded architecture was conceived in 1999 by professors Jordi Puig-Suari from California Polytechnic State University, and Bob Twiggs from Stanford University. The goal to develop a spacecraft architecture that would facilitate academic developments surprisingly triggered the creation of a new philosophy to develop satellites: the use of Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) components, and the reduction of satellite dimensions. These small satellites are equipped with all the subsystems of a traditional satellite, which are composed of COTS components. This strategy speeds up spacecraft development, and drastically reduces the cost of its production. Therefore, the CubeSats are ideal platforms to investigate and develop new technologies.

The inventiveness experienced with CubeSats influenced also the traditional big-satellite activities. New private and adventurous proposals have proliferated in the last years encouraged by their commercial prospects. The most distinguished innovative application for this big platform is the deployment of satellite constellations that provide continuous Internet access. Despite the numerous improvements in the ground facilities, satellite platforms stood out as a potential system to achieve this requirement. LEO satellite constellations are naturally characterized by providing global coverage to the entire planet. Iridium constellation is an illustrative example of how this architecture can provide data access to a widespread group of ground users. Despite this infrastructure, current Iridium services are limited to a poor messages exchange (hundreds of kbps), which may not be sufficient for current and upcoming Internet services (e.g. video streaming, cloud computing, etc.) Therefore, an extension of these traditional LEO satellite constellations has been proposed to cope with this new demand.

Private companies have taken a step forward in the development of massive satellite constellations, which assemble hundreds or thousands of satellites to provide global and seamless Internet coverage with competitive interfaces; i.e. with low latency and high throughput. These ambitious goals cannot be achieved with traditional architectures nor delay-tolerant solutions.

Among the different companies, OneWeb Ltd.—previously named WorldVu was the first one that announced the development of this macro architecture [12]. Joining efforts with Virgin Group and Qualcomm, OneWeb expected to deploy 720 satellites at 1200 km height. This LEO satellite constellation was not designed to include satellite-to-satellite architecture, which requires the deployment of further satellites to satisfy current demand [26].

Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX) publicly announced the development of the Starlink mega-constellation one year later [13]. Starlink comprises 4425 satellites that would be distributed across several sets of orbits. Three different layers are distinguished: the main layer at 1150 km, the secondary layer at 1110 km, and the third layer at 1130 km. This macro satellite system corresponds to an MLSN thanks to the use of satellite-to-satellite laser interfaces, although all the layers are located in the LEO region. SpaceX has already deployed 1,015 satellites of its StarLink mega-constellation, having 951 still in orbit [27].

More recently, Telesat Canada envisioned deploying a massive satellite constellation of 117 small-satellites to compete with the previous constellations [14]. These satellites would include a dedicated ISL with high transmission capacity.

Preliminary studies demonstrated that these massive satellite constellations can provide communications interfaces that can satisfy high-data volumes (up to Tbps), and low-latency communications [26]. Despite the potential performance of this architecture, its enormous size poses numerous challenges. Among the different ones that have been discussed during the last years [28], six challenges stand out: (1) The required funds to maintain the development of the entire project [29]; (2) The necessity to develop and construct a satellite manufacturing infrastructure to reduce the production cost [30]; (3) the increase of space debris due to the overpopulation of the space [15]; (4) the hoarding of frequency bands due to the necessary wide bands allocations; (5) the complex administrative registry of this large number of satellites [16]; (6) Impact on other space fields, like astronomy [31] forcing to develop custom mitigation technologies [32]. These constraints make that the deployment of this massive satellite constellation feasible to specific companies or entities. Another perspective in which does not require the launch of massive constellations from independent entities needs to be conceived to balance these problems.
