Ever since our rocky experiences working with closed and proprietary aerospace hardware on BroncoSat-1 (our first satellite), we have become committed to creating an affordable and accessible open architecture for academic spacecraft. We've started with an educational 1U CubeSat kit that has now found its way to space three times! The PROVES Kit was originally designed entirely by students, for students, by the Bronco Space Group at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona (Cal Poly Pomona). Today it welcomes users and contributors from anywhere in the space community.
The first one didn't get deployed due to an issue with our host vehicle, the second did deploy but only made contact for the first ~50 minutes or so of the flight, and the third 10x'd that number to a confirmed uptime of 9.5 hours! With that kind of exponential growth we're surely only a few updates away from an extremely low cost design that can go the distance. Coming up in 2024 we'll have the launch of the fourth PROVES Kit to orbit and six more are queued up in 2025.
We have a prototype Read the Docs site with assembly guides and discussion about the design behind the PROVES Kit!
Check Out the Documentation Here
Note: The open source designs and documentation are provided primarily for educational and academic research use. If you wish to use the hardware for spaceflight there are many more steps that must be undertaken before the kit is ready to fly. Feel free to reach out for us if you would like advising on what it takes!
Our design intention was to create a complete educational satellite platform with a structure, EPS, flight computer, and comms system for less than $1k and we present it here now for the open source community. The practical cost of getting one to space is quite a bit more than $1k (our latest launch got one on orbit for just $5k not including the launch cost!), but that is certainly much more affordable than any commercial platform on the market. We would not recommend you try and build one from scratch unless you have relatively extensive experience with custom PCB and structural manufacturing.
We're going to be selling the kits soon. Please stay tuned!
Also feel free to reach out to Michael Pham at mlpham@cpp.edu if you would like to have a further conversation.
We couldn't do this without engagement from our community of university CubeSat developers! Our friends at the Stanford Student Space Initiative have done some amazing work and are some of the most exciting people to work with. The folks at the Hawaii Space Flight Lab and the Portland Space Aerospace Society OreSat team also have some awesome open source CubeSat architectures of their own!
