Thoughts on CubeSats
2009 January 29
posted here 2011 June 11 cbd

One day I was responding to the article Cubesats - How Small Can Satellites Get?

From my perspective, there are two problems with small satellites that this author did not mention.  The first is aperture.

Space is huge and people who think they can't live on less than 9600 baud need big, pointable antennas when they go to Mars or even the moon.  I'm sure we could detect a Cubesat at Mars and could recover data from it at the rate of several bits per hour, but that won't get us many pictures.

The other has to do with personnel.  Working with some of the early career hires at JPL, we were trying to pitch a CubeSat-based idea to the group.  Interestingly, one of the reasons they didn't like the idea was that, "Oh, we did Cubesats at university, we want to do something real now."

So this doesn't help with the problem of convincing the "think big" people at NASA and JPL that small things can have profound uses.

Remember all the grousing in the 1980s when people started saying they had Fortran, Pascal, Cobol, and all the "real" computer languages on their TRS-80s?  People who had worked a career on mainframe computers were saying, "That's not the same thing, these hobbyists have no idea what real computers are all about."

Nowadays, all of those people (both camps) are using a computer in their cellphone that is more powerful than anything they were arguing about back then.  And we no longer know or care to know all the hassles of getting a room-sized computer to give one answer to a differential equation per hour.  That whole line of research is, itself, gone.

The same thing with spacecraft.  There are things you could do with a small spacecraft and the trivial cost is an enabler, but no one thinks that way yet, not even the new hires fresh from univeristy, sadly.

My observation working with one university is that it is still a personality based activity.  Someone will be the real leader who knows minute details of everything, is dependable, and is a pleasure to work with, like Jan King, W3GEY, was at AMSAT back in the 70s and 80s.  What happens at university is that the students flock around that leader, as we did around King, and think that they've done something easier than what they've really done.  There are those who think that the university CubeSat programs cut out too much of the work for the students and don't expose them to some of the real hassles of the space business in order to fit it into a few semesters classwork.  Not an easy problem, but I agree with the assessment.