"The winners of the next 100 years will be defined by their use of space." Max Bhatti ## Software Defined Spacecraft Basalt believes that a fully-reprogrammable general-purpose spacecraft is the final hurdle to General Commercial Space. Software in aerospace is an afterthought - it is single use. If the satellite needs a new function the whole codebase is scrapped, the equivalent of recoding your OS because you bought a new mouse. Satellites today are no different from kit-computers in the 70s. Compare that to a rack of commercial servers - each rack costs about the same as a modern commercial small satellite but it can be tasked to run multiple different processes, often unrelated and by different users on different interfaces. This is the breakthrough that made cloud computing and the modern internet possible. Following commercial computing, a fully-reprogrammable general-purpose satellite can reduce the barrier to entry by non-aerospace companies to space by a thousandfold. While most satellites are designed for a single mission, often from inception. Basalt's spacecraft can be reprogrammed in orbit and re-tasked for different missions.