Fifteen Years of CubeSats in Space
Recognized today as the origin of the New Space revolution, this tiny spacecrafts have revolutionized the Space Age, challenging the traditional ways of space exploration.
The barriers to access the Space have lowered very fast. With the end of Cold War, many missiles of both sides encountered a new pacific use as spatial vehicles. The miniaturization of electronics is spectacular since decades. For first time began the use of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components, very affordable, in space. The movement of open source in software and hardware pervades technological innovation. And crowdfunding creates a new bunch of opportunities for the democratization of space access.
In this context, CubeSat standard was created in 1999 as a collaborative effort between Jordi Puig-Suari, a professor at California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly), and Bob Twiggs, a professor at Stanford University’s Space Systems Development Laboratory (SSDL) to facilitate access to space for university students.
Many times qualified as “Bread-Loaf Size Satellites,” a CubeSat is a 10 cm (4-inch) cube with a mass of up to 1.33 kg (2.93 pounds). CubeSats can be scaled from one to several units (“one unit” or “1U”, 2U, 3U…). Inside this container we can put anything we want; the payload of the satellite. The CubeSat uses and ad-hoc orbital deployer, i.e. a “Poly-PicoSatellite Orbital Deployer” or P-POD for short. CubeSats are carried to space inside one of this orbital deployer. This compact packaging ensures at same time the safety of the CubeSat and protect the primary satellite on the launch vehicle. And easily can fit as a “secondary payload” in the current launch vehicles (until the recent appearance of launchers exclusively dedicated to put smallsats in orbit). The CubeSat Design Specification (the current version of the standard is the cds _rev13) is published in the CubeSat website: http://www.cubesat.org/
As Bob Twiggs put it, “It all started as a university education program satellite.” The question was: How to do something that students could afford during their master’s degree to launch for a reasonable price? At the time, nor NASA nor any military organization nor aerospace industry had not interest and not funded the low cost alternative!!! In a chat, Bob says “I’m kind of glad that NASA didn’t help us, or we’d probably never got it done. It was developed for the education of students.” For its part, Jordi Puig-Suari gave a lecture with the self-explanatory title ‘CubeSat: An Unlikely Success Story.’
But finally, first CubeSats were launched in June 30, 2003 from Plesetsk Cosmodrome, by a Rokot, a space launch vehicle derivative of an intercontinental ballistic missile from the USSR, supplied and operated by Eurockot Launch Services. The manifest of Rokot launch included six CubeSats:
• XI-IV (Sai Four) developed by Intelligent Space Systems Laboratory (ISSL)-Nakasuka Laboratory at University of Tokyo, Japan
• CUTE-I of Tokyo Institute of Technology (TITech), Tokyo, Japan
• CanX-1 of the University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
• AAUSat of Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark
• DTUSat of the Technical University of Denmark, Lyngby, Denmark
•QuakeSat of Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA
A very detailed information of this first CubeSats is compiled in “CubeSat - Launch 1”. By the way, Cubesat XI-IV (Oscar 57) is still operative fifteen years later!
So far, more than 800 nanosatellites (CubeSat standard) have been launched into space since 1999 in Earth orbit. The number of launches is exponential and the pace of miniaturization and innovation is astounding! Among this launches we have seen the first truly personal do-it-yourself satellite by korean artist Hojun Song (the OSSI-1) or the greek UPSat mission by the Libre Space Foundation, the first completely open source satellite ever launched. The achievements of CubeSats are amazing, overcoming the initial misgivings towards these small spacecrafts, and conquering enthusiasm and imagination of all people interested in space exploration. Fleets of CubeSats offer a daily image of all Earth, made the most innovative experiments from quantum communication to first node of a blockchain in space, are revolutionizing the astronomy… Are you a CubeSat maker, participated in one of his project? Please, share your experience in the comments section.
And now the first twin interplanetary CubeSats (Mars Cube One or MarCO), designed to monitor InSight landing, launched on May 8, 2018, are already on the way to Mars, going where no CubeSat has ever gone before. NASA hopes MarCO CubeSats could transform the future of space exploration paving the way for low-cost exploration of deep space.
The age of small spacecraft is booming. Pocket spacecrafts (PocketQube), PhoneSats (using smartphone as spacecraft), Spacecraft-On-A-Chip pointing to interstellar travel (Breakthrough Starshot project)… Ad astra!
Josep Saldaña Cavallé
Catalunya, June 2018
