Logan • Turns out, a space conference needs more space — not out there in the cosmos, but right here in Utah.
The Small Satellite Conference, hosted in Logan for nearly four decades, will be moving to Salt Lake City next year. The event’s chair, Pat Patterson, announced the change during Monday’s conference, saying the event has outgrown the northern Utah city.
The conference, commonly referred to as the SmallSat, is held each August and attracts thousands of engineers, rocket scientists, academics and inventors from around the world. Attendance has swelled since the first conference, held in 1987, when only 45 people joined, Patterson said. This year, he estimates there are 3,700 to 3,800 attendees, stressing a city with only about a thousand hotel rooms.
“I just absolutely love it here,” Patterson said. “But it’s time to do what’s best for the industry, and that is to move to a location with a better infrastructure.”
That location will be the Salt Palace Convention Center, where Patterson said the conference can take place under one roof, is walking distance from numerous hotels, and is near the airport.
The conference was started by two Utah State University professors who wanted to provide a place for university students to practice creating satellites at a time when doing so was extremely expensive. As the years went by, a microelectronic boom led to satellites becoming physically smaller and easier to create, completely changing the satellite industry.
Eventually, money started pouring into the industry, and it blew up, Patterson said. So did SmallSat, until it became what it is today: a place for the best minds in the business to introduce their technologies in small spacecraft development, review academic reports, come up with new ideas and network.
“Everybody wanted to come to SmallSat in Logan, because that’s where they, as a student, came,” he said. “They participated in the student competition, they wrote papers, they gave posters. As they kept coming back, it got bigger and bigger and bigger.”
While the conference’s attendance expanded, so did its reach. Now, Patterson said, attendees come from nearly 40 countries.
One participant who has attended for six years, Tom Walkinshaw, comes from Glasgow, Scotland, each year to showcase his business, Alba Orbital, which produces tiny cube-shaped satellites.
He has watched the conference grow, with more people from a variety of backgrounds attending, justifying the long journey to Logan, he said.
“Logan’s a beautiful place,” Walkinshaw said. “That’s a shame, obviously, that it can’t maintain the weight of the event now. It just got too big and successful.”
The conference has also expanded from exclusively serving university students to welcoming anyone with the vision and goal to build satellites.
Filip Busco, who this year is attending the conference for his second time, is still in high school. The 17-year-old designed and launched the first functional satellite in Romanian history.
He said the supportive community fostered by the SmallSat has helped him accomplish his dreams.
“I started dreaming about launching a satellite when I was in middle school,” Busco said. “Seeing this dream turn into a reality was, I mean, it still is a great, great feeling.”
This year’s conference runs through Thursday. Next year’s SmallSat will be held Aug. 11–13.
