By Timothy R. Olsen, ’09, M.B.A. ’18

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To create something with a worldwide impact is a grandiose dream to be sure.

But that’s exactly what a trio of university faculty members did in the late 1980s. Frank Redd, Gil Moore, and Rex McGill — all faculty members within the College of Engineering — held the first Small Satellite conference at Utah State University in 1987.

That inaugural event, held at the Eccles Conference Center on the Logan campus, drew 45 attendees. The most recent edition, the last to be held in Logan, reached nearly 4,000.

“It is one of those vital areas where Utah State University really helped change the world,” says Charles Swenson, a professor of electrical and computer engineering and director for the Center for Space Engineering at USU.

Swenson, who is the associate chair for the SmallSat Conference, has attended the event every year since 1991 and has been involved with running it at some level for the past 20 years.

Kristen Wilkinson (’95), Redd’s daughter, remembers hearing about the conference and its beginnings around the dinner table.

“I still remember where we were sitting, and my dad was talking to my mom,” Wilkinson recalls. He’s like, ‘I decided to call it the first annual conference on small satellites.’ I think that’s kind of audacious, because he had no idea if there’d ever be a second one — just kind of pure hope. He decided to call it the ‘first annual’ instead of just calling it a conference, and it took off, it really caught on. There was a need.”

However, that need wasn’t always obvious.

Bigger and Better

The Space Race really took off in the late 1950s with the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik (185 pounds). Shortly after, the United States launched Explorer 1 (30 pounds), Vanguard 1 (3.2 pounds), and Pioneer 1 (75 pounds) — all small satellites by today’s standards.

“Build it bigger” seemed to be the mantra in the ’60s and ’70s, though, as advancements in space technologies increased the capabilities of satellites and spacecraft. They became larger and more complex, and in turn became more expensive to build and test. Launched in 1988, the Onyx 1 (formerly Lacrosse) radar imaging reconnaissance satellite weighed roughly 32,000 pounds.

“They became really complex and hard to build,” says Pat Patterson, the Director of Advanced Concepts at USU’s Space Dynamics Laboratory and chair for the SmallSat Conference. “We quickly left the realm of small satellites. I would say that in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s the whole theme of the space industry was, ‘The bigger the better.’”

Patterson — who graduated from USU in 1989 with his bachelor’s in electrical engineering and then followed that up with a master’s in 1991 (electrical engineering) and Ph.D. in 2005 (space systems engineering) — has been involved with the conference, one way or another, since the beginning.

He says he didn’t “know anything about anything” but remembers standing in the back of the Eccles Conference Center at the first event where boxes of donuts and gallons of orange juice were lined up.

“I sat right in the back and I ate donuts and drank orange juice and listened to people talk about space. I had no idea who they were,” Patterson recalls. “By the time that conference got over, I was convinced I needed to be a space guy. That was my takeaway, ‘This is cool. I have a passion for this.’”

The Transition

Sending things into space is expensive and time consuming, and that was especially true during those early years. In the mid-1960s, there were only six entities capable of even doing so — all countries with government-sponsored space agencies (United States, Soviet Union, United Kingdom, Canada, Italy, and France).

But as the1980s dawned, the building blocks for what became the small satellite industry took shape. Battery chemistry was changing and solar cell capacity was increasing; the microelectronics boom was well underway as home computers became commonplace.

Initially, the adoption of small satellites was slow. The space industry is generally careful, opting for proven technologies and significant testing prior to widespread use — they don’t want to send things into space that will fail. But in 1985 as part of the Space Shuttle Challenger Spacelab III mission, astronaut Don Lind — who would later teach physics at USU for nearly a decade — pushed the button that deployed the NUSAT from the shuttle’s canisters, a first for the program. 

The Northen Utah Satellite (NUSAT) was a joint project between Utah State University and Weber State University, and according to NASA “was the forerunner in a new type of worldwide industry to build small, simple, and low-cost satellites for special applications.”

Patterson says NUSAT was the first university-developed satellite ever put into space, and Lind’s son, David, remembers how excited his father was to be part of the moment.

“He was very excited that it was taking place. It was an opportunity to involve undergraduates in cutting edge research and doing some very interesting things,” says David, a longtime physics professor at Florida State University. “Whenever he got involved in something he would come home and we would sit down at the kitchen table, and we’d get a first-hand view of what was going on. That was kind of exciting.”

As it turns out, the combination of emerging technology and USU’s on-campus resources with the Space Dynamics Laboratory, along with an abundance of interested faculty and students, was the perfect recipe for the SmallSat Conference to take off.

Full Speed Ahead

As the small satellite industry grew, so did the conference. From Northrop Grumman to SpaceX to NASA and governmental space agencies throughout the world, the conference attracted the top minds in the field. Elon Musk’s conference presentations — along with every other briefing and paper that’s been delivered at SmallSat — are available for download through the USU Digital Commons.

In 2024 alone, there were more than 300,000 downloads of SmallSat Conference papers and presentations from that repository.

“That’s almost 1,000 a day over the last year,” Patterson says. “So, Utah State is … being viewed all over the world from the space community, especially from the research community. … It’s really been an incredible team effort between Utah State and the Space Dynamics Lab.”

Swenson says the vision of the conference from the very beginning was to bring people together from multiple communities — academic, industrial, commercial and governmental — to jump-start space research innovation.

And bring people together they did.

Eventually, the conference grew out of the Eccles Conference Center to the Taggart Student Center Ballroom. Then to the first and second floors of the TSC. Then throughout the USU campus.

In 2024, attendees from more than 1,300 organizations and 45 different countries visited the Logan Campus for the conference. For many of them, it may be their last visit to Cache Valley as the conference shifts to Salt Lake City in 2025 to better accommodate that growth.

“People use the term ‘new space’ sometimes to talk about it, but it’s been a real revolution,” Swenson says. “It’s a great honor and it’s been a great ride to be part of this community that’s changed the way the United States and the world approach space.

“But it’s kept growing and growing. I can’t overstate when I say that this is the number one small satellite conference in the world — internationally recognized in everything — but it’s also a huge impact on the space community in general.

Growing Up

There are slightly more than 1,000 hotel rooms available in Cache County. Even with the rise of vacation rentals, finding lodging for the conference has become hard and expensive. The rooms would sell out a year in advance, with some conference attendees reportedly paying more than $900 a night for a hotel room in the Logan area. Many more conference attendees stayed in Ogden and even Salt Lake City, commuting back and forth each day for the conference.

Wilkinson, whose father died in 2003 after a battle with cancer, says her mother began renting out rooms in her house during the conference.

“She had one year where she had rented out both bedrooms, but she had two other people just beg her, ‘Please don’t you have somewhere for me to sleep?’ So, she had both bedrooms booked, her family was in the basement, someone sleeping on the couch, and then she had a last-minute student email, so she put her in the living room upstairs on the sofa, just because there was nowhere to stay,” Wilkinson remembers.

As the conference transitions to Salt Lake City, the availability of rooms will no longer be a problem. The new venue, The Salt Palace Convention Center, will also help re-centralize conference attendees again. What has been a hodgepodge of locations scattered across campus, including SDL’s Innovation campus, the Aggie Recreation Center, the Nelson Fieldhouse — which included the rental of massive temporary air conditioning units — the Quad, and various other locations, will now be concentrated in one place.

While the days of Redd walking around ringing a bell to let conference-goers know the break between sessions was over are no longer. Wilkinson says it was always her dad’s desire for the conference to be different than others in the field by creating an intimate atmosphere where attendees could get to know each other and those presenting. This change in venue will, in a way, allow the SmallSat Conference to return to those roots.

“It really took the whole university to make all of this happen. None of this would have happened without the university,” Patterson says. “People should be proud of this. I hope they know Utah State has, in a positive way, influenced the space industry. They probably don’t realize how much they actually impacted the space industry.”

The Road Ahead

Much like the SmallSat Conference itself, the small satellite industry has seen massive growth. For decades — from the mid-1960s to the early 2010s — the number of objects launched into space worldwide has consistently hovered around 100 per year. In the mid-2010s those numbers began to increase before exploding in 2020.

Nearly 3,000 satellites were launched into space in 2023, and of those, 97% were small satellites.

“In terms of sheer numbers, small satellites are dominating the market … they’re saying 3,900 will be launched each year for the next 10 years. That amounts to 10 satellites a day for the next 10 years,” Patterson says. “We were launching 100 a year, and now we’re launching 10 a day. There is growth there. … the industry is moving forward very fast and very healthy.”

And, while the conference may be undergoing its most drastic change of the past four decades, Utah State University and the Space Dynamics Laboratory will continue to be front and center.

“I’ve watched seeds be planted in so many different ways within the space community and then watched the seeds grow up into major companies that are reshaping completely how we do space,” Swenson says. “And to realize the people that started those things were the ones that were at the Small Satellite Conference and were part of this community coming to Utah State, eating Aggie Ice Cream, that’s just been, for me, tremendous and very rewarding.”