Session
Weekend Session 6: Coordinating Successful Educational Programs
Location
Utah State University, Logan, UT
Abstract
A "university-class" mission is one where the training of the students is as least as important as the in-orbit results from the spacecraft. Since the University of Melbourne's Australis OSCAR 5 launched in 1970, nearly 300 universities around the world have built & launched 720 university-class spacecraft. But, most of these events are recent: more than half of these schools had their first launch in the last five years. Coincidentally, 5 years ago is the last time that a paper like this was presented at the conference. And thus it's worth updating the previous work with all these new data points!
Therefore, this paper will review the history of university-class missions with an emphasis on the last five years. These missions will be cataloged and collated to look for trends in spacecraft size, mission type, and on-orbit performance. As usual, three sets of questions will guide the discussion:
- What kinds of missions have been flown, are being flown and should be flown?
- What are historical and present-day mission success rates for university-class missions?
- Why are the mission success rates so poor?
University-Class Spacecraft in 2023: More Missions, More Problems?
Utah State University, Logan, UT
A "university-class" mission is one where the training of the students is as least as important as the in-orbit results from the spacecraft. Since the University of Melbourne's Australis OSCAR 5 launched in 1970, nearly 300 universities around the world have built & launched 720 university-class spacecraft. But, most of these events are recent: more than half of these schools had their first launch in the last five years. Coincidentally, 5 years ago is the last time that a paper like this was presented at the conference. And thus it's worth updating the previous work with all these new data points!
Therefore, this paper will review the history of university-class missions with an emphasis on the last five years. These missions will be cataloged and collated to look for trends in spacecraft size, mission type, and on-orbit performance. As usual, three sets of questions will guide the discussion:
- What kinds of missions have been flown, are being flown and should be flown?
- What are historical and present-day mission success rates for university-class missions?
- Why are the mission success rates so poor?
