From CubeSats to Beyond: A Deep Dive into SpaceDucks with Steve Dunton
Exploring the Origins, Advancements, and Future of SpaceDucks with Satellite Payload Expert, Steve Dunton
It is almost June which means summer. But for OWL, it means more than that. It means SpaceDucks! And this year we are deploying SpaceDucks IV. SpaceDucks started as a mere capstone project with California Polytechnic University but turned it into a huge initiative. Every year, our technology improves, our team gets bigger, and most importantly, our relationships are growing. This time we would like to kick off this initiative with an interview with one of the faculty from Cal Poly, Steve Dunton. Since the beginning, he has been with us building the program within Cal Poly and mentoring the students as well as OWL during SpaceDucks! Please Enjoy this interview!
Could you tell us more about your background and expertise on satellite payloads?
Steve Dunton: Sure, I worked for Hughes Space and Communications starting in 1996. That company was later acquired by the Boeing Company. And so I worked roughly 30 years in the satellite business primarily focused on satellite payloads. I probably worked on 20 to 30 satellites. I’ve had various roles such as starting on a factory floor to testing satellites to mission operations, both floor leadership roles and program leadership roles, I’ve served as a chief engineer in my last assignment. I was responsible for a product line. That peaked with about five payloads in various stages of design and build at the same time.
Is it true that Cal Poly is like the father of these CubeSats?
Steve Dunton: Cal Poly are one of the parents of CubeSats. Cal Poly along with Stanford developed the CubeSat standard. CubeSats are 10 centimeter by 10 centimeter by 10 centimeter modules. If you only have one of those it’s about the size of a box of Kleenex. That module is a one unit of CubeSat. Cal Poly currently has a 3u program going on. That’s the one we’re trying to hitch a ride on. CubeSats can get as large as 6u or perhaps 12u. And again Cal Poly along with Stanford developed that standard and Cal Poly has been flying CubeSats in space for over a decade now.
How did you become involved in this SpaceDucks initiative?
Steve Dunton: I got involved with the SpaceDucks and really OWL because I had a student who was involved with that and I knew Evan Agarwal. That was one of the first Cal Poly students to work with OWL but I was actually approached by Josh Franklin who was doing some work with OWL. We were trying to do a range test. I had advice for him on how to simulate range tests in the lab by using attenuators to simulate the loss in range and loss in power, the further you get away. I asked him more about the project. I was very intrigued by the name of the Cluster Duck Protocol. And I said, I need to get a t-shirt or something that says clusterduck on it. And so Josh Franklin was how I got involved.
What excites you the most about the potential applications of SpaceDucks?
Steve Dunton: So my background, educationally and professionally, besides satellites is communications and we’re very much focused these days on having multiple communication paths. OWL is potentially putting a node in space or at a high altitude platform, to me, it’s just a very intriguing idea of how to get low cost communications and by networking them together have a very long range in these mesh networks. And so that’s really what intrigued me about the SpaceDucks now.
How do you see SpaceDucks contributing to a field of resilient communication and sensor networks?
Steve Dunton: So another great question because satellite cell phones exist now, but they’re coming in a big wave. The 5G standard has an iteration coming for 5G NTN, non-terrestrial networks, and the manufacturers are investing billions in making that happen and frankly OWL is not going to be able to compete with everybody’s cell phone that can connect to a satellite. And to the leading companies, there are links and ASD space mobile and of course now SpaceX has announced that rather than using their network, you can use satellite networks to communicate their satellites via StarLink.
However if you have people in remote locations for disaster relief firefighters, you can hand them all a cell phone. And that’s a thousand dollar price point. So I think where the role for OWL is and proliferated communications is not to compete directly with the cell phone, but to be the low cost alternative where you need something frankly that could be treated almost as disposable or if you’re doing remote sensing. You don’t have to spend a thousand dollars for a cell phone everywhere you want to monitor moisture in the soil or gassy emissions or wildlife, that’s the place where OWL’s SpaceDuck has a role.
What are some key challenges for developing the satellite payloads and what advancements do you see in SpaceDucks 4?
Steve Dunton: There’s several things going on associated with SpaceDucks 4. One we’re on this path to space and so the space environment is very different than the terrestrial environment. And Cal Poly has the ability to simulate and test the space environment: temperature and pressure in a vacuum chamber, a vacuum chambers, vibration (its a bumpy ride going up on a rocket). So we’re going to take the Ducks and expose them to see what we can learn from that make sure Ducks can survive those environments. The Ducks are currently sort of long and skinny but the CubeSats are square. So now we are developing a square version. We call the current version of the radio board QuAD (Quacker Advanced Development Board). And so we’re making a SQuaD, space QuAD. So just adapting to the form factor the size to fit in a CubeSat. We’re doing that. We’re going to go through space environments for the demonstration and testing.
We’re also interested in greatly expanding the network and evaluating multi-hop. So in the past high altitude balloon tests, we’ve gone up and down we’ve gone maybe up across and down but we’re looking at having many nodes now, maybe a dozen or two dozen nodes. We can have one on a balloon, one on a drone. We’re looking at multiple balloons having lots of things on the ground and just really demonstrating the ability of a large network and not just two or three points.
Can you share any more memorable moments or milestones from previous deployments?
Steve Dunton: It’s just really cool to see these things go up high enough that you lose sight of them. And then because we’ve been flying cameras to see that, it would not quite be the edges of space but we’re getting there and to see the view of the earth looking down from the SpaceDucks in those videos. That’s extremely cool. And one of them we were flying a couple and the balloons when they get to a high enough altitude and the air gets extremely thin at some point the balloons pop and then they come back down. We captured one of those on camera because one balloon pop before the one with the camera on it pop and that was really incredible to see so, the view of Ducks in space almost is very impressive.
Have you done similar projects like this with the Cal Poly students?
Steve Dunton: I’ve had some involvement in the CubeSat effort but I didn’t have any involvement in balloon tests prior to collaborating with OWL and SpaceDucks. So now that’s a really cool part of it. And it’s a really nice culminating event because we tend to do it at the end of the school year. We’ve had a number of wonderful people who come and go. Some of them come back as alumni, but I think for the students too who spent a year or more working on this have culminated in the balloon launch. That’s a really nice experience to have.
How valuable do you think these types of deployments are to the students?
Steve Dunton: Yeah, we’ve had a lot of seniors working on that. We’ve had some graduate students working on that. It’s difficult to have a meaningful project. For either senior project or a thesis that can complete nine months and so oftentimes students contribute to an aspect of a project to improve some aspect of a product for their culminating event. And when you do that, you’re part of a larger thing, which is really good, but you don’t always get to see the fruits of your effort. So we’ve continued to increment the technology and then test it via balloon launch. That’s just a really nice feeling to see what you’ve worked on. It goes up on a balloon and we test it and so to reach that sense of completion is very satisfying. And of course, it’s nice to see people have their experience, too.
Surprisingly some of the students are freshman and sophomores. They hear about this project and they want to join too!
Steve Dunton: Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. You don’t have to have designed or built what goes up on the balloon in order to participate in a balloon launch and to fill the excitement of that and this year because we’re talking about testing a large network we can do that with just remote sensors, but that’s also an opportunity for us to have people or bring in people who haven’t been associated with a project before and get them to operate one of the radios on the ground part of the network while we’re doing all this too.
What advice would you give to individuals or organizations looking to get involved in similar initiatives?
Steve Dunton: We just completed the CubeSat Developers Workshop, last week. So that’s a conference that Cal Poly hosts annually with the various CubeSat developers. We also have some small satellites and some large satellite companies come there because they recruit from our students and the other people who attend there. So if you’re getting started in the CubeSat world, I’d encourage you to look at the next year’s CubeSat Developers Workshop. There’s value, of course, in hearing the speakers. We spoke this year talking about what’s going on but there’s tremendous networking value just to see who’s there, talk to other people and are involved with companies and universities and learn about it.
And the other thing I would say I’ve been very impressed with is the student involvement. Don’t be afraid to let students do things. The Poly Sat program is student-run at Cal Poly and we have maybe two and a half faculty advisors and all the faculty advisors have other full-time jobs, but we try to provide insight and advice to the students when they need it, but it’s a student run initiative. So learn what you can through the conferences and other things and don’t be afraid to let students do things.
One last question. One of the biggest projects you led last year was making some amazing steak to celebrate the end of SpaceDucks. Will that happen again this year?
Steve Dunton: Making an amazing steak. Yes. Yeah, I hope so. California uses a cut of beef that’s not available everywhere, that’s called tri-tip. and So you may find tri-tip in Texas as well and some other places, but yeah, it’s always fun to have a barbecue and do some beef, maybe some chicken, some veggies, grill some bread. And yeah, I’d be happy to do that as well. And that’s an impressive Airbnb. It’s close to campus. But it’s kind of remote as well. There’s just a nice big old house out in the country with a lot of rooms and a big patio and barbecue and I think there was a fire pit there if I recall so that’s a nice part of the culminating event as well.
