‘Sky’s the limit’ for USU undergrad team that sent satellite into space – KSL.com

Members of USU's Get Away Special team in Cape Canaveral, Florida on Monday, preparing to watch the of a satellite they built. The small satellite, called GASPACS, uses a custom-built inflatable aerodynamic boom to passively stabilize its orbit. (Get Away Special team, Utah State University)

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LOGAN While most people were soundly asleep at 3 a.m. on Tuesday, a group of undergraduate students from Utah State University were wide awake seeing their dreams come to fruition as they watched NASA launch a satellite that they engineered into orbit aboard SpaceX's CRS-24 mission.

A project eight years in the making, the Get Away Special Passive Attitude Control Satellite (GASPACS), a CubeSat built by USU's Get Away Special team, launched Tuesday from NASA's Kennedy Space Center, with a destination of the International Space Station. Built entirely by undergraduate students at USU, satellite is a technology demonstration that uses a custom-built inflatable aerodynamic boom to passively stabilize its orbit.

The CubeSat is "about as small as you can build a satellite, (it's) about the size of a loaf of bread," said Ben Willard, team member and public relations contact on the project.

Willard said the mission of the CubeSat is to use an inflatable boom to stabilize the satellite along one direction, "almost like feathers on a dart would you throw the dart; the feathers stabilize the dart so it flies in a straight line."

"The primary mission of GASPACS is to deploy this boom and then photograph it and then send this photograph back down to a custom-built ground station that we have built on the roof of one of our buildings on campus," Willard said. The station is located on the roof of one of the physics buildings at USU.

The launch is especially significant, as the satellite is one of the world's first CubeSats to ever be built by a team of exclusively undergraduate students. And they did it while balancing full course loads and jobs.

"Satellites are extremely technologically advanced. Honestly, a lot of people didn't believe that we would be able to do it," Willard added. "It's kind of like a volunteer part-time job almost, so that definitely adds to the complexity and the timetable of it."

The project has gone through many sets of hands, as some students graduated and others came into the process.

"As students graduate and move on, it's a new set of undergraduates coming up behind them, having to learn everything that definitely takes a toll on it being even more difficult because you're not able to sit down with one group," Willard said.

To manage this difficulty, the team conducted lots of research, leaned on trial by error and reached out to experts in the industry to get advice, Willard said.

Did he and his team stay up in the early hours of Tuesday to watch the live stream of the launch?

"Absolutely," he said, emphasizing that watching the launch after the years of hard work means a lot to the team.

"One of the things we really try and do is help more students and more people have this love for space being able to say we actually have something that's in space, that's something that very few people can say," Willard said, noting that he's seen a lot more freshman join the team over the past year.

As for the future of the Get Away Special team, it's looking to keep pushing the envelope when it comes to undergraduate achievement.

"We're currently working on plans for our second satellite, we're working on proposals to send to NASA to get that accepted into the program. Now that we have built one and now that we've proven it is possible, the sky's the limit. We're just planning on continuing to build more."

The Get Away Special team welcomes all USU students to participate in leading technological developments in space, and interested students can learn more about how they can be a part of the team by signing up here.

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'Sky's the limit' for USU undergrad team that sent satellite into space - KSL.com