DIY satellites reinvent the space race

Soon, Romania, Colombia and a high school in San Jose, Calif., will
join the space race.

An ambitious program called CubeSat, developed at Stanford University
and California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, is giving
students and companies the opportunity to build and launch functional
satellites into low Earth orbit, or about 240 to 360 miles above the
planet.

The satellites are tiny--they weigh a kilogram and generally measure
about 10 centimeters on each side--but they cost far less than
conventional commercial satellites. A CubeSat unit costs roughly
$40,000 to build and only $40,000 to launch. As part of the program,
Cal Poly takes care of the bureaucratic and logistical hurdles.

By contrast, a conventional satellite can run between $150 million and
$250 million to build and $100 million to launch.

"I kind of look at this as the Apple II. The ordinary person can get
something into space," said Bob Twiggs, a professor of aeronautics and
astronautics at Stanford and one of the principals behind CubeSat. "We
don't know what the ultimate use is, but look what happened to the
Internet."

In the early 1980s, the Apple II was one of the very first personal
computers to catch on with the general public. In the 1990s, the
Internet exploded into mainstream use after years of being a quiet
academic byway. Can the same happen with satellites?

While the CubeSats can't compete with commercial satellites in terms of
performance, they're more than just orbital knickknacks. Stanford and a
company called QuakeFinder launched a triple CubeSat in 2003 that
monitored seismic energy emitting from faults, which can be a precursor
to earthquakes. Every time the QuakeSat flew over the San Andreas
Fault, low levels of energy were detected, Twiggs said. A
second-generation version is being designed for a 2008 launch.

A University of Tokyo CubeSat propelled by solar panels, meanwhile,
sends down compressed digital photos taken with a low-resolution
camera. So far, nine have been launched and three more will go up in
the spring.

"I didn't think they could do it, but I get a digital photo every
week," Twiggs said.

The program is giving students at different schools a hands-on
opportunity to work on spacecraft, an avenue of research that otherwise
would be largely out of reach. A group of Romanian students at the
University of Bucharest and sponsored by the Romanian Space Agency are
currently crafting three different CubeSats, while Twiggs is advising
students at Colombia's Universidad Sergio Arboleda on how to put one
together.

"They've never built one in Romania before, the same with Colombia," he
said. "We're creating a whole new generation of students really
genuinely interested in space."

Meanwhile, a group of students at Independence High School in San Jose,
Calif., are working with one of Twiggs' graduate students and aerospace
giant Lockheed Martin on the KatySat program. Once built, Katysat
(which stands for "kids are never too young for satellites") is
expected to exchange messages between Independence and another high
school somewhere on the globe. The teenagers will also learn to plot
Katysat's location, get the satellite to send signals to their
counterparts at the other school and perform experiments.

While space is no longer the playground of government agencies, most of
the private individuals tinkering with travel to the cosmos are
incredibly wealthy. Technology entrepreneur Greg Olsen, for instance,
is splurging on a junket to the International Space Station early this
fall to the tune of about $20 million. Other deep-pocketed space
dabblers include Amazon.com's Jeff Bezos and Microsoft co-founder Paul
Allen

Space Age Klondike Bar
Twiggs began to tinker with the possibility of creating small, cheap
satellites in the mid-1980s when research budgets were at risk. In
1994, while teaching at Weber State University in Utah, Twiggs and
others worked on a satellite that "was about the size of a lady's
hatbox," he recalled.

A few years later, the idea then emerged that a mother satellite could
be used to launch smaller, "pico" satellites. An experimental version,
which had daughter satellites about the size of a Klondike bar equipped
with solar panels, worked well. Later, Twiggs used a 4-inch-long Beanie
Baby box as a design ideal.

The configuration of the CubeSats varies, depending on the tasks the
designers hope to accomplish. While some have a footprint of about 4
inches by 12 inches, the typical ones are around 4 inches cubed.

The CubeSats get launched out of the Poly Picosatellite Orbital
Deployer, or P-POD, designed by Jordi Puig-Suari, a professor at Cal
Poly. The spring-loaded P-Pod can carry up to three of the cubes and
protects the CubeSats from the primary payload, and vice versa.

Cal Poly's expertise also comes in handy in logistics. Companies such
as Eurokot and Kosmotras perform the actual launch, which take place at
locations like the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in northern Russia. Some of the
rockets used in the flights were originally designed for nuclear
warheads and launch from silos. Thus, the launches require export
licenses and coordination with a variety of engineers and others.

The university charges a fee of $40,000 for a launch and participants
must get the satellite to them two months before lift-off. Despite the
modest scale, the undertakings aren't always a cinch. The spring
launch, for instance, was supposed to take place at the end of this
month, but has been postponed because the primary payload on the trip
has been delayed.

Although U.S.-based launch companies have begun to express interest,
the money is generally below their threshold. "But the Russians are
very interested in small projects," Twiggs said.


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