Three miniature satellites — CubeSats — launching into orbit from the International Space Station in August 2018.Credit: ESA/NASA-A. Gerst

“The first trillionaire will be made in space,” US Republican Senator Ted Cruz told scientists and entrepreneurs in May at a Washington DC summit on sending humans to Mars. He could be right, but only if we rethink space technology.  The cost of launching a satellite is comparable with the value of its weight in gold. It takes thousands of dollars to send one kilogram into low Earth orbit, often ten times more than that. Returning material is even more expensive: it cost the equivalent of US$250 billion per kilogram of sample for Japan’s Hayabusa spacecraft to bring back less than 1 gram of asteroid grains in 2010. The price tag for the whole mission was $250 million.

Still, space is big business. Globally, companies invested about $262 billion in 2016, mostly on using satellites for telecommunications, navigation and remote sensing1 (see ‘Lift-off’). Governments, too, spend billions — about $84 billion worldwide in 2016. More than half that ($48 billion) was from the United States, mainly for military, meteorological and communications purposes.  No one is getting much bang for those bucks. Space hardware has not kept pace with technology development and needs to be modernized. Satellites are still too bulky and expensive. Most perform only a limited set of predefined tasks. And, despite the skill and materials that went into them, they fail within decades — much more quickly than a Swiss watch.

At this rate, humans will never venture far from Earth, let alone colonize the Moon and Mars or capture asteroids. Here we highlight three ways in which space technology needs to advance. Costs must be slashed; satellites should be small, nimble and able to repair themselves; and they should operate in swarms.