STAC is very pleased to announce that our Quantum CubeSat (QubeSat) has been selected by NASA for the CubeSat Launch Initiative (CSLI). This will allow our QubeSat to be launched as an auxiliary payload on a mission by NASA, another U.S. government agency, or by industry between 2021 and 2023. NASA’s CSLI will fully fund the launch of QubeSat and provides a low-cost pathway for conducting technology demonstrations in space.

The QubeSat project is one of eighteen accepted proposals that were submitted by NASA Institutes, research organizations, and universities. CubeSats are built in multiples of standard 10 cm x 10 cm x 10 cm (1U) units and are a primary way of democratizing space through providing an accessible method of in-space testing and development.

The QubeSat project’s primary goal is to research the effects of space environments on quantum gyroscopes, a groundbreaking experimental sensor based on nitrogen vacancies (NV-) centers in diamonds. In comparison to more traditional onboard micromechanical gyroscopes, quantum gyroscopes provide improved resolution, improved drift stability and increased temperature operational range. QubeSat’s upcoming mission will allow us to evaluate the effect of the harsh space environment — including extreme temperatures, radiation, and magnetic field variation — that could affect the gyroscopes’s performance in small-scale spaceflight.

QubeSat’s secondary goal is to increase the accessibility of space and to inspire STEM education. Increasing accessibility to space starts at UC Berkeley and the STAC community, which is a group of over 60 passionate students who are working on a range of technologies aimed at making strides in space research. The QubeSat team and the larger STAC community hope to introduce high school and college students to our work though community outreach in the East Bay, giving them the support and inspiration to pursue microsatellite projects and careers in the burgeoning NewSpace era.

If you are a UC Berkeley student and would like to become part of this project, please apply to STAC at stac.berkeley.edu/join.

If your organization would like to connect with STAC through the outreach aspect of our QubeSat, reach out to us inquiry@stac.berkeley.edu

Here is a link to the NASA announcement:
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/nasa-announces-next-round-of-candidates-for-cubesat-space-missions

Space Technologies at Cal (STAC) is proud to report on a very productive year filled with engineering landmarks and achievements. Here is a brief outline of some of the highlights of the year from our STAC family!

This post only contains a brief description of all the hard work the various teams put into these moments, so please follow the links to read more about the engineering challenges and the impacts they have on future space exploration.

The Launch of our TIME I project on a Blue Origin Rocket

On Thursday, May 2nd, on NS-11 (New Shepard Mission 11), we flew our very first Interstellar Microgravity Experiment! The payload experienced an outer-space microgravity environment in which we were able to conduct a number of experiments. These included the reanimation of C. elegans, the testing of laser communication and the operation of a robotic arm. This project was one of STAC’s first and it was very moving to experience the launch and all the drama surrounding it. We are currently analysing the data from the payload and are excited for what we will be able to find. We are grateful to Dent for the opportunity to fly with Blue Origin, as well as all our sponsors who supported this amazing work. Finally, congratulations to all of the TIME I team on such a wonderful achievement!

The Third Launch of our High Altitude Balloon (HAB) Program

In the fall, the HAB team designed and manufactured a new prototype electronics core. The prototype board flew on the HAB III launch, where it collected real-time location and flight data. In addition to our redesigned electronics, we created a new, modular payload design that will allow for seamless integration of experiments into any launch. The team hopes to use a finalized version of our flight computer with this new mechanical design to help control experiments and stabilize the descent of the payload in future launches.

The Deployment of our PCBSat Project from KickSat2

After the delivery of the KickSat2 project in the Cygnus CRS-10 cargo mission to the space station aboard the Antares-230 launch vehicle, on the 17th of November, we waited a few months until the CubeSat was deployed on 13 February 2019 from the spacecrafts external deployer. Then on the 20th March the KickSat2 successfully deployed the femto satellites. This was the first STAC-made object to be flown in outer space. The vast amount of data that was collected is currently being sifted through and analysed. Please follow the link to a previous Medium post about the technology behind this achievement. We would like to thank Zac Manchester for the opportunity to collaborate on such a wonderful project.

The Second Annual Space Tech Symposium (STS2) hosted by STAC

This amazing event was attended by both industry professionals and UC Berkeley students interested in the future of the space industry. The focus was on the intersection between the space industry and other emerging industries. The panel themes were robotics in space, the earth-space services and biology in space. Speakers from a diverse set of backgrounds including NASA, Swarm Technologies, Spire and CASIS shared their thoughts on these fast-changing fields. Thank you to all our speakers and panelists and we are already looking forward to welcoming the Bay Area space community to next year’s event!

These are just a few of the many other developments that STAC played a role in over the past year, including numerous advancements in all of our projects.

These moments would not be possible without not only the financial support of our sponsors but also our industry advisors who provide valuable direction and expertise. We are sad to see the graduating class of 2019 leave us this year but look forward to hearing about all their future endeavours. Stay tuned for more updates!

If you are currently enrolled at UC Berkeley and would like to get involved with some of the exciting work going on, please visit our website for more information about how to join and look out for details about our Fall 2019 infosessions. Also like our facebook page for regular updates.

Have a question? Email execs@stac.berkeley.edu

Space Technologies at Cal is proud to announce a partnership with Bay Area Circuits to ensure that we can turn our PCB designs into effective prototypes.

Bay Area Circuits is a leading PCB Manufacturer in the bay area. They offer PCB prototyping with 24-hour turnaround for two-layer and multilayer boards. They also offer student PCB package discounts, a great way for students to create electronic personal projects at an affordable price. They have kindly sponsored PCB assembly for STAC, which allows us to design and prototype custom electronics.

Designing a board can be a significant investment of time and resources, so it is important to us that our boards are manufactured correctly. As part of our design review process, we use the Bay Area Circuits InstantDFM Report Tool, which provides us with immediate feedback on potential manufacturing issue with our PCBs before we order.

In addition to listing errors, the tool shows us exactly where problems could occur on our boards, allowing us to be confident that the board we designed is correct.

The Bay Area Circuits team has been extremely welcoming and helpful. As our electronics team has doubled in the size over the past year, Bay Area Circuits fast PCB prototyping has enabled us to spend less time waiting, and more time designing what we love.

Space Technologies at Cal (STAC) is proud to announce our partnership with Altium to help power our PCB design and further develop the electronics for all of our missions to reach a new level of technical nuance.

Altium is the industry standard for electronic design and development and ensures every engineer has the ability to create the best design solutions possible. They have graciously supplied Altium Designer licenses for our organization’s use as well as technical support and documentation to ensure seamless integration into our workflow.

STAC Electronics Expert Brent Yi (Brentyi.com) recently held a workshop where he explained the entire end-to-end workflow of creating a PCB design using Altium.

He demonstrated the ease and power of using the software for electronics design.

“I enjoyed routing my PCB in 3D and found the hierarchical PCB design helpful. Importing IC packaging was also extremely efficient in Altium.” — Olivia Hsu

The STAC team has recently grown to be over 50 members and we appreciate the support from our partners, such as Altium, to enable space innovation and development.

For years, we have heard companies talk about reducing the turnaround time of reusable rocket stages, but only recently has that conversation evolved to turnaround times on the order of days. However, a daily turnaround seems completely out of scope when the current payload build-integration timelines are upwards of 6–24 months. Once the current backlog of satellites and CubeSats are launched, this build-integration time will become the bottleneck of the space launch industry and will ensure an increased payload launch cost because weekly or daily reusability is no longer feasible. Let’s dive in.

Launching

There has recently been a huge surge in the rocket development sector, with more than $13 billion invested into startups since 2000. We have seen SpaceX, XCOR, Blue Origin, PLD Space and more innovate to ensure quicker launches through rocket reusability. This will indeed lower the launch cost/payload mass but relies on one major assumption: that there are enough post integration-ready payloads to launch on a regular basis.

According to an analysis done by CBInsights, there are currently more than 200 startups in the satellite development horizontal, working on space exploration, communication, tracking, and satellite constellation operation. They ensure the reusable market’s viability because they are creating thousands of different, innovative payloads to launch. However, building and preparing these payloads takes time, on the order of years. If launching could be done daily, which would subsequently result in all of these payloads being launched, the bottleneck is no longer the launch time, but rather the design, build, and build-integration time. To know more about the currently proposed satellites, visit: Commercial Space Transportation Forecast

Reusability Launch Mass Calculations

Even though each of these satellite development companies aim to create thousands of satellites, every single one of those companies will have to take each individual payload through an integration process that is ridden with massive lag time. This lag time will dramatically increase the supply of rockets even though demand would stay relatively constant, which ensures an increased payload launch cost because weekly or daily reusability is no longer feasible.

Many upcoming rocket launch companies have claimed rocket reusability is only cost effective if it is rapid. Now, let’s assume we have weekly reusability by seven major rocket companies. This would be 52 (launches a year) x 7 (companies) = 364 launches at an average of 22,000 kg per launch (using Falcon 9 to LEO mass): 364 x 22,000 = 8,000,000 kg per year.

Let us compare this to the total mass of payloads launched since 1957. Using a simple Python script to gather the mass of each spacecraft, courtesy of Skyrocket, we have only launched a total mass of 10,000,000 kg ( LEO, GEO, etc.) from 1957 to 2016! Reusability is definitely the optimal way to launch this mass, but we would either need the equivalent of 40 more years (at the past rate of development) worth of payloads ready each year to launch, or a dramatic reduction in the build-integration time by an order of magnitude, about 50 times faster that we launched payloads in the past.

Build and Integration

Satellites can range in mass because they contain all the way from 1000 kg+ payloads down to about 0.5 kg payloads. Even though one may think it would be harder to develop and launch a 1000 kg payload versus a 0.5kg payload, both are actually nearly identical in integration time necessary. This can be explained by all payloads facing very strict integration regulations and requirements regardless of mass.

We have reached out to industry experts to understand the integration process for larger payloads and we received answers that both made sense and shocked us.

What made sense? The larger the payload, the more a customer pays and thus has more of a direct connection with the launch provider. This ensures that a middleman, such as a payload integrator, is taken out of the equation. What shocked us? The integration timeline is at least 2 years for larger payloads. Each payload has to go through arduous procedures to show that it fits within the payload fairing, passes structural analysis and stiffness requirements, and supports coupled loads analysis. Beyond meeting build requirements, there is the physical integration event where a payload is delivered and integrated into a rocket, which requires traveling multiple times to the launch site before the six week delivery process even starts. In order to completely hand over a payload, a “group” must be formed — The Assembly Integration and Testing (AIT) group which is comprised of subsystem leads and employees of the launch provider to complete full integration, which can last multiple months.

Now, what about smaller payloads? With the reduction of payload and satellite size (i.e. the CubeSat model), companies, such as Spaceflight Services and NanoRacks, have emerged to help integrate payloads “easily” into a spacecraft. They provide a series of safety checks before a payload enters a rocket. Although they provide rocket launching companies ease of mind through simplified integration, they also increase the integration timeline by an order of magnitude due to numerous design checks and requirements. This very process would end up hurting a spaceflight company once the current backlog is cleared out because it adds more time lags in addition to the payload building time.

We are currently in the heat of this build-integration process with our organization’s microgravity payload, The Interstellar Microgravity Experiment (TIME) by STAC (Space Technologies at California — UC Berkeley.)

How does it work? We have a MONTHLY integration phone call to check the design of our payload and ensure all of our work is disclosed and understood by NanoRacks to meet their standards. We will be in this process for the next several months until our launch. During this process, not only will we have to communicate detailed reviews of what we are exactly doing, but we will also have to iterate our design to meet the standards set by NanoRacks and our launch provider.

This is not meant to disparage NanoRacks — they do an amazing job with the help and services they provide, but the process has led us to realize that this exhaustive process will be a major roadblock for future spaceflight. According to one CEO working in the industry, the current record from going from payload design to launch is ~7 months.

Potential Solutions — what can we do about this?

We have outlined a few solutions to start the conversation about the upcoming bottleneck in this industry, but in no way have started working on a solution.

Integration Automation —

Create a mechanism beyond standardizing the size of a Satellite as the CubeSat movement did. This would entail manufacturing plants specifically designed to build a custom satellite, much like the computer manufacturing process.

Fewer Payload Requirements —

Dramatically reducing the design constraints on a payload will help to some order of magnitude. Something to be worked on though for sure.

Single Safety Testing Platform —

Creating a system that puts a satellite through a standardized testing system for any rocket would help reduce human testing and design reviews.

Let’s take these new found problems and solve them to enable rapid launch reusability! We would love to hear your thoughts about these solutions and other solutions to expedite the build-integration process. Feel free to reach out to us or comment below with your thoughts!

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

By Travis Brashears and Malhar Patel — Space Technologies at Cal (STAC) stac.berkeley.edu

Enjoy this article? Follow STAC on <LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Website>.

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Enjoy what you read? Share, like, and comment! All opinions expressed are our own and they do not reflect the opinions of any of of our other organizations. Have a question? Email execs@stac.berkeley.edu

In late Fall, we will be launching a payload into space. For FREE!!! Thanks to Blue Origin.

STAC recently won a competition where the winner would receive a free launch on Blue Origin’s New Shepard space craft. The competition is sponsored by Dent:Space, a conference held last September in SF. The two Co-founders of Dent (dentthefuture.com), Jason and Steve, flew two of our members out to make the big announcement at the Dent Sun Valley, Idaho conference.

Join our journey as we pave the way for interstellar travel, one experiment at a time.

More information can be found here: http://original.dentthefuture.com/2017/03/20/dentspace-competition-winner/

That is why at STAC we make it our mission to allow people to foster in an area they strive in, but also take part in any/every part of the STAC organization! This creates a healthy team dynamic and creates a limitless organization.

Check out our awesome team:

Today we turned our first designs into a prototype and determined that we will need to rethink our arrangement of parts inside our first Microgravity Experiment.

First Prototype — — Week 1

Stay tuned for more updates! :)

Below is a sneak peak at our winning payload design!

Stay tuned for more details!