August 9–12, 2010
24th Annual Conference on Small Satellites

Small Sat keynote speaker

Doug Lemon, Aaron Rogers, Charles Swenson, Jean-Michel Contant, Pat Patterson, Robert Meurer, Stan Albrecht

Monday mid-morning and the Taggart Student Center was a dynamic crowd scene on the first day of the AIAA/USU Small Sat conference. A line of attenders waited to pick up their name badges and goody bags, greeting colleagues they may not have seen since last year’s Small Sat. Attenders wended through the exhibitors’ booths that filled the entire second floor. Twenty-two university exhibitors and 64 commercial and government exhibitors had set up their booths the evening before and early that morning.

David Pritts at the ATA booth said they had put up their booth the night before and mounted their posters that morning. ATA and SDL are sharing their complementary talents in a new facility in Albuquerque. Dr. Pritts said, “I’m looking forward to the ribbon cutting August 19th.”

Instarsat’s CEO John Webb, Jr. manned his company’s booth, Number 1 in the lineup and just inside the TSC’s east entrance. He explained that his company sought solutions for underserved markets, focusing on a nontraditional space market. With the company’s new spacecraft design that differs from the CubeSat, he offers a spacecraft core without systems, as well as the bus with integration, test, and technology demonstrations for commercial companies. Without prompting, Dr. Webb offered, “This is the best conference that I go to, bar none.”

Traffic at the booths nearly disappeared when the conference officially opened with Patric Patterson of SDL and Stan Albrecht of USU welcoming attenders and introducing the keynote speaker, Jean-Michel Contant, Secretary General of the International Academy of Astronautics.

Dr. Contant’s talk traced the history of early rocket engineering from the V2 through the diaspora of rocket engineers to the U.S.A., France and England, and later to China. After 1984, IAA began working on small satellites because of their shorter development time and greater flight frequencies that better matched the educational cycle. Currently, the IAA is pursuing a sustainable program for small satellites. Starting with Tunisia, Syria and Cameroon, the IAA is providing direction to countries that are newcomers to small sat operations. Because of the human needs in many developing countries, small sat usage is planned to yield disaster management, data exchange in remote sensing, earthquake prediction and life science spinoffs, such as telemedicine for Africa. IAA’s future plans involve a peer-reviewed web portal on small satellites providing information to countries new to space. Multilingual access to information will include technical and economic databanks on small sats.

A busy first day closed with a social alongside the pond on Innovation Campus. Small Sat conference attenders from around the world relaxed and socialized with their peers while they enjoyed a catered dinner and live music. John Simpson of Culinary Concepts said the dinner’s main course of meats, tofu and vegetables en brochette took five days of prepping, marinating and smoking, while dessert-meister Grace Harvell noted that 10 gallons of milk went to make the pastry cream for the trifle. As the sun went down on the crowd around the pond, tours of SDL left at half-hour intervals, and finally, with increasing dark, attenders disbanded, heading for hotel rooms on campus and in town. A new day of meetings, technical sessions, panel discussions and booth hopping was coming up in less than 12 hours.

Like a space engineer’s marketplace fantasy, the exhibitors’ booths at Small Sat offer something for everyone. A sampling of booth-bound company reps yielded viewpoints from suppliers, and customers were heard during the midmorning technical session Demand Side Visionaries.

At the Ball Aerospace booth, Sarah Sloan noted that the company works with “all kinds of customers, not a monolithic government customer.” Even the same agency, she said, includes various customers. For instance, within NASA, scientists are proposing NASA missions and folks are representing NASA centers; within DoD, there are different entities, various missions and various testing technologies. Intra-governmental needs vary with priorities, requirements, and interfaces with contractors.

“That’s one of the reasons we come here – to keep in contact,” she said.

At the booth of ZARM Technik, based in Bremen, Germany, company representative Peter Offterdinger said this was the second year running for his company’s attendance at Small Sat. “We usually have attended GNC in Breckenridge. What brings us here is the scientific bent of the conference.” ZARM provides instruments for LEO-orbiting small satellites, including magnetic actuators for attitude determination in satellites ranging in mass from CubeSats to 2-ton spacecraft.

At the Moog CSA Engineering booth, Joe Maly explained that with Moog’s recent acquisition of CSA came “more capability, and more products.” CSA produced the ESPA ring (EELV Secondary Payload Adapter) to accommodate six small satellites on Delta 4 and Atlas 5 rockets. The impressive, full-size, five-foot-diameter wooden mockup of the actual aluminum structure shows how multiple small satellites fit together for simultaneous deployment. Another CSA product, Softride, isolates satellites from the massive vibration during launch. Paul King from the Moog side noted the company’s propulsion technology for GEO satellites could well give way to a future in small satellites. After 10 years of Small Sat conference attendance, he noted current strong interest from the small satellite community, especially in a propulsion product of low-toxicity to replace hydrazine.

“We’re working with a Swedish company on HPGP, a high-performance green propellant,” he explained.

In Technical Session IV: Demand Side Visionaries, Maj. David Schultz of the National Reconnaissance Office voiced both the advantage and the challenge involved in small satellite development, saying “If you’re not small and fast, you’ll become big and expensive.” He acknowledged the balancing act involved in keeping the advantages of small satellites while seeking improvements in secure communications, expected lifetime, reliability, processing and standard control.

NASA’s interest in Small Sat technology development and demonstration – seen in the Franklin and Edison programs – was noted by market analyst Jeff Foust of Futron Corporation and NASA’s Paul Hertz of the Science Mission Directorate. The $100 million to $200 million over the next five years provide an emerging opportunity.

Student Presenter David Gerhardt

Just as small sats will play a large part in the future of space exploration, so will students of aerospace and related fields supply the brain power to make that happen. Listening to presentations at the 18th Annual Frank J. Redd Student Scholarship Competition and taking a random walk around the university exhibitors’ booths indicated there wouldn’t be a shortage any time soon.

Student presenters from Colorado, Utah, Surrey (England) and Missouri communicated their ideas and projects for small sat instrumentation, instrument and solar sail deployment, attitude control and propulsion.

Stan Kennedy of Comtech AeroAstro, Inc., technical chair of the competition, commented on the caliber of the presentations: “They’re great! And, it’s always good to encourage STEM education (science, technology, engineering, mathematics).”

Meanwhile, at the university exhibits, sophomore Lauren Persons said her time at the booth explaining the projects has helped her gain a better understanding of University of Colorado at Boulder satellite projects outside of those she was working on.

“It’s been really fun, especially the networking,” she said.

UC Boulder aerospace senior Carolyn Maurus agreed: “Since we have our RockSat program, it’s a great opportunity, seeing all the booths and going to some technical sessions.” Sessions on launch vehicles for small and large satellites interested her particularly.

Kirstyn Johnson, an aerospace engineering sophomore at UC Boulder and project manager for the university’s new rocket satellite effort said she was most impressed with the opportunity of talking to many company representatives “all in one place.”

Student Exhibit

Windell Jones and John Furumo, mechanical engineers from University of Hawaii, said their satellite, which calibrates radio stations, will be ready for flight this January, set to replace the current, 17-year-old satellite. The new satellite’s name? Ho’oponopono – it means “make it right.”

Jones, a first year grad student, has enjoyed visiting various booths “to see what’s already out there for COTS parts,” although he hadn’t been to many technical sessions. Furumo, a junior involved with the satellite program for only a few months, noted that small satellite technology seemed to differ from large satellites in being “more accessible to everyone.” Wiki-smallsats, anyone?

Standing before the Missouri University of Science and Technology’s booth, James Meub said his group’s main focus has been the two-year Nanosat 6 competition sponsored by AFRL. A second-year master’s student in aerospace, he is the program manager. The entire 10-member sat team is eager to hear which team will gain a free launch opportunity for its satellite effort. He said they’ve been taking turns booth minding, touring the exhibits and attending tech sessions.

Along with the memorably named SwampSat, the University of Florida is home to Shawn Allgeier, an aerospace engineering PhD student in his “nth year.” While the university has been represented at Small Sat for several years, this is his first year attending. In between booth time, he has enjoyed visiting other exhibits, finding them “very good in both appearance and content, very relevant,” and has collected business cards and notes to follow up later.

Late in the afternoon, when university, industry and government exhibitors were packing up their displays, the scholarship competition concluded with an awards ceremony. Judging criteria were explained and sponsors were thanked as the student presenters sat, fidgeting expectantly.

On his first time in a competition, David Gerhardt declared, “It was nerve-wracking, but a very good experience. The whole conference has been great.”

Ryan Pahl said, “It was very surprising, honestly. It came down to a lot of late nights and a lot of early mornings.”

Chris Tutza, confirmed, “We’ve been practicing for a few days. And we were actually practicing earlier this morning, finalizing our timing, getting it down.”

They added that their advisor “helped a lot by critiquing us.”

After the awards, competitor Quintin Schiller said, “It’s a really good introduction to the smallsat community.” His colleague, Abhishek Mahendrakumar, who shared the prize, added, “It’s a very great encouragement for students.”

Student Winners

As UPS personnel looked to help the last few boxed-up exhibits onto their trucks, Small Sat conference-goers attended the remaining morning technical sessions. During one of the breaks, Dean Wiberg, a program manager at CalTech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, summed up his understanding of the future of small sats.

NASA Franklin and Edison programs are expected to boost small sat interest and development. Although JPL,one of 10 NASA centers nationwide, is planning involvement with those NASA programs, Wiberg expects to be only “tangentially” involved. However, he offered insight based on a 17-year history at JPL.

“I see small sats as an emergent technology that really represents the extrapolation of Moore’s law,” he began.

Moore’s Law, originating with Gordon Moore in the 1960s, has proven true for many electronic and computer-oriented innovations: The number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit has doubled approximately every two years.

“The reduction in size represented by Moore’s law not only applies to electronic systems,” he said, “but also to microelectromechanical systems, nanotechnology, those sorts of things. It’s really enabled a form factor that is going to allow small sats to utilize fairly high capability without the large form factor and power requirements that have historically been needed. This is an emerging opportunity. Although it’s far from mainstream now, you can see by the number of people here and the quality of the papers that have been presented – It’s moving forward with a momentum that would be pretty hard to stop.”

As to the disadvantages of small sats, Wiberg agreed that a constellation or swarm of cubesats could supply many of the advantages of large satellites: “They represent one of the principle solutions of the arguments against small sats,” he said, and concluded, “I think if we follow this conference for five or 10 years, we’re going to see the emergence of the significant capabilities that are represented by these small sats.”

Join the Small Sat conference in 2011 on its quarter-century anniversary, and take part in the accelerating progress of small satellite research and development.