Spacecraft Design, Development and Operations in Just Five Hours per Week: Experience from the USAF Academy FalconSAT Program

Abstract

The paper describes overall experience and lessons learned from the USAF Academy's small satellite research program-"FalconSAT"-and the challenges faced by undertaking serious space mission development in a highly-constrained undergraduate environment. The goal of the program is to give students the opportunity to "learn space by doing space." Background on the program is first presented including successes and failures since the program's inception. Discussion begins by focusing on specific curriculum changes made within the Academy Department of Astronautics over the last several years to enable students to have even 5 hours per week to devote to space mission development. The culmination of this curriculum is a capstone small satellite design course sequence. The processes within these courses will be described along with how the courses are organized to get the maximum amount of learning and effort out of the students given the limited class time available. Various aspects of the courses will be discussed such as the Design Review Process and how cooperation with other departments and organizations help to provide expertise and extra funding. Challenges associated with these courses and the associated project that the students are expected to complete are also discussed. How are student learning objectives and real world deadlines balanced? How is the problem of high student turnaround handled? The paper will discuss various solutions the Academy has evolved to address these challenges. The paper concludes with current program status and recent feedback from students involved in the project.

Student Design, Development, And Operations Of Small Satellites At The United States Air Force Academy

“…By buying into this SNAPSat architecture, the Academy program has achieved an "out-of-the-box" solution for several critical subsystems; including power, communications and, most important, data handling [3].…”

“…FAST provides both a long-term facility for cadets to gain hands-on experience with spacecraft hardware and software, as well as overall program risk reduction by providing a facility for subsystem, software, and operational procedures development and testing. While the use of commercial off the shelf (COTS) hardware such as SNAP has eased the design problem in many respects, considerable effort still remains in the areas of payload design and development, structures, attitude control, thermal control, solar panels, testing and operations-more than enough to challenge even the most ambitious undergraduate students [3].…”

“…Successful operations and data recovery from FalconGold concluded that GPS signals could be used for orbit determination, even beyond the altitude of the GPS constellation [2]. With the space launch of FalconGold, the groundwork was in place to continue the program exclusively with space launched satellites [3]. The Academy's first "free-flyer" satellite, FalconSAT-1 (FS-1), was a 52 Kg satellite launched on January 14, 2000 aboard the first Minotaur launch vehicle (a modified Minuteman II ICBM) along with several other university-built micro-satellites.…”

“…Unfortunately, a power system problem became apparent soon after deployment. Despite repeated attempts to recover the spacecraft by the cadet-faculty operations team, the mission was declared a loss after only one month [3].…”

“…Cadets also manned the Academy's ground station during overhead passes of a satellite not operating under normal conditions. Cadets involved with trouble-shooting the anomalies soon after deployment certainly gained deep insight into system functions and operations [3].…”