LOGAN, Utah– It was a dark day for CubeSat builders. The seventh launch of the Dnepr launch vehicle hauling more than a dozen spacecraft blasted upward into the night from its silo at the Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan. But then some 73 seconds into the launch, the converted Cold War SS-18 missile ran into trouble. The booster and its cargo of satellites crashed downrange, plowing into an unpopulated desert area.
The accident resulted in the loss of 18 satellites, including the first spacecraft of Belarus — a remote sensing craft called BelKA — along with a Russian satellite developed by the students of Bauman State Technical University. Also on board were several smaller satellites: UniSat-4 and PiCPoT from Italy, and five “P-Pod” containers collectively loaded with 14 CubeSat satellites from 10 different universities around the globe and one from the U.S.-based The Aerospace Corp. , a federally funded research and development center.
It was billed as the largest ever deployment of CubeSats into Earth orbit — a milestone that was not to be.
There was a sense of shared loss, requisite group therapy and a passion to move forward with future launches when members of the CubeSat community gathered at the 20th annual conference on small satellites, held here at Utah State University Aug. 14-17 .
Stolen success
Representatives of ISC Kosmotras, the Russian and Ukrainian launch services company, said a malfunctioning hydraulic drive unit in a combustion chamber on the booster’s first stage was the root cause of the July 26 crash.
Dave Klumpar, a research professor of physics at Montana State University and head of the school’s Space Science and Engineering Laboratory, watched the launch from a vantage point a few miles from the Russian-run Baikonur launch facility in Kazakhstan. The Dnepr carried the school’s first-ever satellite, the Montana EaRth Orbiting Pico Explorer, or MEROPE. It was a proud product of some 5 years of work.
“We watched the rocket arc overhead … then there was a bit of a flash and darkness … followed by a couple of dimmer flashes. That was our first clue that there might be something wrong,” Klumpar recalled. “At first there was a lot of uncertainty, followed by total letdown. … We were really looking for a success … to show we built a successful satellite and it operated in the space environment,” Klumpar said. “And that was stolen from us. We can’t make that claim.”
Educational punch
While CubeSats may be petite in size, they pack an educational punch.
CubeSats measure about 10 centimeters and weigh a mere kilogram . Their standardized shape makes them cheaper to produce in a much shorter period of time, with students able to design, build, test, launch and operate the satellites while still in school.
The CubeSat Project is an international collaboration of more than 80 universities, high schools and private firms. The tiny, satellites, which can be held in the palm of your hand, are built to specifications that were developed by California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo (Cal Poly), and Stanford University’s Space Systems Development Laboratory.
Through companies like Kosmotras, CubeSat launch costs currently run about $40,000 per single cube.
CubeSats can perform many tasks. Several duties of the recently destroyed satellites, for example, were to flight qualify a wide variety of small sensors and attitude control devices; take images of Earth; collect data on the electrical strength of clouds in the ionosphere; as well as chart the Van Allen radiation belts and test hardware and ideas not yet flown before in space.
Eye-opening experience
“The Dnepr failure was really hard for a while,” said Cal Poly’s Jordi Puig-Suari, CubeSat project co- director and chair of the university’s Aerospace Engineering Department. “I probably didn’t realize how hard it hit us. For two weeks we didn’t get too much done. Everybody was in a zombie state,” he said .
Puig-Suari said CubeSat teams worked long and hard in readying their respective satellites for launch on the Dnepr. “It was a positive step that we made it to the rocket … not a trivial thing. It was a kind of eye-opening experience and as real-world as it gets.”
Added William Whalen, a Cal Poly aerospace engineer specializing in thermal vacuum testing of CubeSats: “It was devastating, obviously, immediately after the failure.”
Nevertheless, a number of universities are working on follow-on CubeSats, he said.
“We’re not stopping … we’re looking for more launch opportunities. We’re not going away. This work will continue to continue … and expand,” Whalen said. “It isn’t just to go up there and show that we work, but it’s also to show that we’re resilient.”
Mindset is changing
Puig-Suari is optimistic about the future of CubeSats. “I think we’re starting to get interesting. The technology is shrinking and we can do useful things,” Puig-Suari said, thanks to micro-electronics, powerful processors, tiny cameras and other systems.
“There was a lot of skepticism on the part of industry,” Puig-Suari said, “that CubeSats couldn’t really do anything useful because of size.”
That mindset is changing, he said. “Things are picking up; w e’re starting to see industry CubeSats that are not from universities. NASA is building them; Boeing and The Aerospace Corp. too. That’s very different from the past. That kind of shows that there’s something here that wasn’t here before.”
Building an infrastructure
The momentum behind CubeSats won’t be shoved off course by an errant booster, said Bob Twiggs, CubeSat project co-director in the Department of Aeronautics & Astronautics at Stanford University, Calif .
“We have always said that getting the student satellites to the launch completes 95 percent of the educational goals of the project,” Twiggs advised. “There is disappointment for everyone, but they can also be proud of the achievements made in their program. There are many levels of success that we try to stress in the student satellite programs like building an infrastructure at the schools that allow them to do such projects. They learn many skills that we can’t teach in the class room.”
Despite the launch snag, Twiggs said, the CubeSat student efforts are developing the best trained students that will be the next generation of space engineers, “and we hope a much larger generation of the general public that has a renewed interest in space exploration.”
