Session
Flash Talk Session 1
Location
Salt Palace Convention Center, Salt Lake City, UT
Abstract
On this milestone of marking the 40th SmallSat conference, this paper provides a capsule summary of how it all started in 1987, and why.
By January 1986, Utah State University was actively involved with NASA’s Space Shuttle program, which from April 1981 through mid-January 1986 had notched 24 successful missions in a row, including nine in 1985. Missions were starting to appear routine, and the manifest was full for many dozens of future missions.
The Shuttle’s Get Away Special (GAS) secondary payload program had become quite popular within academic, government and commercial sectors, and through 1985 six dozen separate GAS canisters had been launched, many with multiple experiments inside. Notably, integration of the very first GAS payload, GAS-001, was led by USU students. Other USU GAS experiments had been launched and more were in development. USU, Weber State College and Thiokol Corporation had developed the basketball-sized Northern Utah Satellite (NUSat), which had been ejected from a GAS canister in late 1985. Leveraging this experience, USU was spinning out one of the earliest smallsat companies, Globesat, Inc., and discussions were underway with Thiokol to jointly develop a larger ‘FatCan’ built with carbon composites to accommodate larger Shuttle secondary payloads. Elsewhere on campus, USU’s Space Dynamics Laboratory (SDL) had developed several major Shuttle payloads, with some launched and others in the development pipeline. Many undergrad and graduate students were involved with these efforts, and a stream of PhDs and MS degrees depended on the data and results derived from them.
The Challenger accident in late January 1986 disrupted all of these efforts. It was unclear at first what caused the accident, but it appeared highly likely that Shuttle launches would pause for at least a year or two, as might funding for many Shuttle-related projects. (The final report on the cause was released over four months after the accident, and the next Shuttle did not launch until 2 ½ years after the accident.)
Several weeks after the accident, recognizing that the theses and graduations of many graduate students at USU and elsewhere were now in serious jeopardy, three men met on the USU campus to consider options for dealing with the crisis. The meeting was held in the office of Dr. Rex Megill, a professor in USU’s Center for Atmospheric and Space Science (CASS) and also the senior faculty advisor for USU’s GAS program. Joining him were Dr. Frank Redd, a mechanical engineering professor with a lead role at SDL; Gil Moore, a senior executive at Thiokol and early supporter and promoter of NASA’s GAS efforts; and the lead author of this paper (Ridenoure).
This meeting and subsequent events and planning, as summarized herein, led to the First Annual USU Conference on Small Satellites, held at USU in the fall of 1987.
Document Type
Event
Presentation
Included in
The Genesis of the Annual USU Conference on Small Satellites
Salt Palace Convention Center, Salt Lake City, UT
On this milestone of marking the 40th SmallSat conference, this paper provides a capsule summary of how it all started in 1987, and why.
By January 1986, Utah State University was actively involved with NASA’s Space Shuttle program, which from April 1981 through mid-January 1986 had notched 24 successful missions in a row, including nine in 1985. Missions were starting to appear routine, and the manifest was full for many dozens of future missions.
The Shuttle’s Get Away Special (GAS) secondary payload program had become quite popular within academic, government and commercial sectors, and through 1985 six dozen separate GAS canisters had been launched, many with multiple experiments inside. Notably, integration of the very first GAS payload, GAS-001, was led by USU students. Other USU GAS experiments had been launched and more were in development. USU, Weber State College and Thiokol Corporation had developed the basketball-sized Northern Utah Satellite (NUSat), which had been ejected from a GAS canister in late 1985. Leveraging this experience, USU was spinning out one of the earliest smallsat companies, Globesat, Inc., and discussions were underway with Thiokol to jointly develop a larger ‘FatCan’ built with carbon composites to accommodate larger Shuttle secondary payloads. Elsewhere on campus, USU’s Space Dynamics Laboratory (SDL) had developed several major Shuttle payloads, with some launched and others in the development pipeline. Many undergrad and graduate students were involved with these efforts, and a stream of PhDs and MS degrees depended on the data and results derived from them.
The Challenger accident in late January 1986 disrupted all of these efforts. It was unclear at first what caused the accident, but it appeared highly likely that Shuttle launches would pause for at least a year or two, as might funding for many Shuttle-related projects. (The final report on the cause was released over four months after the accident, and the next Shuttle did not launch until 2 ½ years after the accident.)
Several weeks after the accident, recognizing that the theses and graduations of many graduate students at USU and elsewhere were now in serious jeopardy, three men met on the USU campus to consider options for dealing with the crisis. The meeting was held in the office of Dr. Rex Megill, a professor in USU’s Center for Atmospheric and Space Science (CASS) and also the senior faculty advisor for USU’s GAS program. Joining him were Dr. Frank Redd, a mechanical engineering professor with a lead role at SDL; Gil Moore, a senior executive at Thiokol and early supporter and promoter of NASA’s GAS efforts; and the lead author of this paper (Ridenoure).
This meeting and subsequent events and planning, as summarized herein, led to the First Annual USU Conference on Small Satellites, held at USU in the fall of 1987.
