[Ground-station] Call for discussion: ORI satellite program

[Bruce Perens]

ORI can and should have a satellite program. There are a lot of things our
volunteers are interested in that are not on AMSAT's road map, and won't be
in the near future. We can fly them. I would like to start soliciting
grants and otherwise raising money. There is one problem:

I don't know anything about satellites. I am trying to rectify that issue
as fast as possible, but although I am a competent systems programmer and
evangelist and have run grant projects for ARPA and the Government of
Norway, I am not an engineer. So, I won't ever be the principal
investigator of this sort of project. But I can sell a grant where someone
else is the PI. Besides, administration and fundraising for ORI is going to
be a big enough job.

So, we are going to need some technical leadership to step up. But maybe
first, we should start discussing what we want to do.

I have some ideas that might be naive, don't be afraid to tell me so. But
hopefully these will start discussion.

One thing that has struck me about AMSAT is that they have so far operated
with only NASA as their launch partner, and they've always built a
satellite only after there was a clear launch opportunity. Today, we have
commercial launch providers as well as the government ones, we have
relationships with them that we *could *start to use, and they have a good
deal of experimental and below-capacity launches going on. For example,
TESS (a NASA mission launched by SpaceX) was quite tiny and even with the
orbit they targeted there was lots of capacity left in the rocket.

So, my idea was to run an "Opportunistic" satellite program, in which we
would construct cubesats and P-pods without a clear launch opportunity in
advance, and then approach commercial launch providers (and others) with
ready-to-fly equipment in hand when opportunities come up.

We can also make better academic partnerships. Fully 50% of academic
cubesats fail, due to lack of experience, poor component choice and
engineering decisions, and because they don't understand radio well. There
is also the issue that University projects aren't well equipped to continue
to control the satellite over a period of years, and that FCC doesn't want
paid employees as satellite licensees or operators if they're licensed in
the Amateur service.

So, my thought was to partner with universities and to provide them with
finished cubesats with room for their experiment, using Karn's modem rather
than the poor AX.25 implementations they usually use, and operating the
satellite for them after launch. They would get the launch and run their
experiment. The satellite would be a hamsat during or after the experiment.

What do we want to fly? Well, obviously our digital communications system.
What else?

    Thanks

    Bruce

-- 
Bruce Perens K6BP - Standards committee chair, license review committee
member, Open Source Initiative
President, Open Research Institute
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