More smallsats for big science jobs

NASA is putting more of its bets on small satellites as it tries to do as much science as possible while (this part is unspoken) navigating around the budgetary gravity wells of the Space Launch System and James Webb Space Telescope.  I'm not calling those programs bad ideas, but they are the financial centers of today's NASA universe: everything else has to fit around them.
Anyway, NASA leaders are betting that small satellites can be used for an increasing number of science missions and they can accept risk: a mission success rate of 85 percent is acceptable, whereas large missions simply can't fail.  NASA went down a bit of a similar path in the 1990s with the Faster-Better-Cheaper paradigm, with mixed results, but the technology of very small spacecraft has advanced by generations, and the philosophy is more different than it might appear.  Whereas FBC could be summed up as "take a conventional spacecraft and shrink it," the new paradigm is more about "what science can we do with technology that's already been shrunken?"

It's going to be an exciting future for the smallsats, microsats, and nanosats (many of them using the CubeSat technology that's revolutionized access to space), and it's not going to be a wave of interest this time: it's going to become part of the foundation of future space science and exploration. 

See you at the Conference on Small Satellites!