Myles Clark - So what’s all this about CubeSats?

It wasn’t long ago that building spacecraft and testing technology in space was the realm of large corporations and big governments, due to the enormous costs of space hardware development and launching that hardware to space. That began to change around 30 years ago when the idea of building tiny spacecraft with off-the-shelf components and piggybacking them onto existing large satellite launches, started to become common. Born of the on-orbit experiences of many university-led spacecraft missions during the 90s, the CubeSat standard arose as way to lower the barrier of entry in developing spacecraft missions.

What is a CubeSat anyway? How do you make them? Are they actually any good at producing science data? At making a company money? (Spoilers: Yes and Yes).

In this presentation I will give a brief history of the CubeSat, what exactly the standard is, and how a CubeSat mission is put together. I will show some standout examples of their use in both scientific missions and commercial applications. I will go over some of the ways the US government encourages and enables participation from schools and universities, through programs, grants, and launch opportunities. Finally, I will present a couple of CubeSat missions from the Precision Space Systems Lab at UF, such as our precision time transfer mission currently on orbit (CHOMPTT), and our upcoming CubeSat laser communications mission (CLICK).