As the 2026 Small Satellite Conference in Salt Lake City gets underway an ongoing trend continues, small satellites are getting bigger, at least on average.
Case in point, today Kongsberg NanoAvionics has unveiled a 500-kilogram version of its flagship satellite bus, more than doubling the mass of its previous top-of-the-line model and designed squarely for defence and intelligence customers. The Lithuania-based manufacturer’s new MP42D can carry payloads up to 250 kilograms, a scale that would have seemed contrary to everything “small satellite” meant a decade ago.
The company says the first five satellites built on the new design are already built or delivered, including for Spanish Earth-observation firm Satlantis, its U.K. thermal-imaging subsidiary SuperSharp, and an undisclosed operator in Southeast Asia. Those contracts are worth more than $16 million (€10 million). Launches of the satellites built on the larger platform will start this fall. NanoAvionics also stated that its Norwegian parent Kongsberg and Spanish very-low-orbit (VLEO) specialist Kreios Space have since ordered more.
“Our Gen-2 microsatellite buses respond to increasingly advanced and demanding mission parameters,” chief executive Atle Wøllo said in a statement.
That growth is not an outlier. BryceTech’s annual smallsat census puts the industry average at 223 kilograms in its 2025 report, nearly double what it was less than a decade earlier, even after stripping out SpaceX’s and OneWeb’s larger broadband satellites. Gabriel Deville, a senior consultant at Novaspace, the analytics firm formerly known as Euroconsult, puts the industry’s new “sweet spot” at roughly 200 kilograms.
The reason is mostly economics, not ambition. A decade ago, launch was so expensive that a smaller satellite was often the only one a newer operator could afford. SpaceX’s reusable Falcon 9 and rideshare missions changed the math. With the price per kilogram decreasing, operators started buying more capability instead of less.
Kepler Communications, the Toronto satellite operator, is a clear Canadian example. Its first-generation satellites weighed about 12-22 kilograms apiece. In January, the company launched the first satellites of a much heavier generation: 300 kilograms each with new capabilities and hosting payloads.
NanoAvionics and Kepler are not strangers. NanoAvionics began integrating Kepler’s optical network into its own buses in February, in a partnership capped at spacecraft up to 500 kilograms — the same ceiling as the bus NanoAvionics unveiled this week.
Fewer, heavier ‘small satellites’ can now do the job that used to need a much bigger fleet, and updated U.S. FCC rules requiring defunct satellites to deorbit within five years made launching small fleets harder to justify.
A decade ago, the industry’s bet was that small meant cheap, and cheap meant more of them. What NanoAvionics and Kepler are both building toward now is close to the opposite: fewer satellites, each one doing more, but still considered small satellites.