What if I told you that a spacecraft the size
of a kiwi fruit, powered by the exact same lithium
ion battery sitting inside your old digital camera,
spent a year and a half successfully orbiting
the Earth? And, you know, not just orbiting,
but fully functioning. Right. Welcome to the
Deep Dive. Today we are unpacking the story of
$50 Sat. It also goes by Eagle 2 or Oscar 76.
Yeah. But whatever you call it, the main takeaway
here is that this is a fully functional satellite
that costs less than $250 in parts to build.
Which is just wild. It really is. Its chassis
was constructed from local sheet metal, and it
completely shatters the illusion that space is,
you know, exclusively a multi -billion dollar
club with pristine clean rooms and gold foil
wrapped probes. Because space has historically
been heavily gate -kept by massive government
agencies, right? And defense contractors. Oh,
absolutely. You usually have thousands of engineers
treating every single component like a priceless
artifact. But $50SAT was a deliberate, scrappy
mission to prove that real -world space engineering
could be fundamentally stripped down. And today,
we are going to explore the physical nuts and
bolts of how you actually build a spacecraft
for the cost of, like, a decent pair of sneakers.
Right. And also the philosophy behind what's
known as the pocket cube standard. We'll look
at how this specific project sought to make aerospace
engineering accessible for college students.
OK, let's unpack this, because before we open
up the hood of this incredibly cheap satellite,
we need to understand the minds behind it. This
feels akin to a high school shop class deciding
that instead of building a wooden birdhouse they
are They're going to construct a deep -sea submarine.
That's a great analogy The collaborative educational
spirit is really the entire foundation of the
project It was spearheaded by a professor named
Bob twigs at Moorhead State University alongside
three radio amateurs, right? Howie de Fleece
Michael Kirkhart and Stuart Robinson exactly
and their primary objective was never to take
high -resolution photos of galaxies or you know
conduct groundbreaking astrophysics. It was more
of a proof of concept. Completely. Their goal
was to evaluate if the pocket cube standard which
is a specific set of design parameters for incredibly
small satellites, could be a viable, cost -effective
way for engineering and science students to learn
real -world aerospace skills. And when we say
pocket -cube, the dimensions we're talking about
are almost comically small. Oh, they're tiny!
The design specs show it measures just 5 by 5
by 7 .5 centimeters. It's classified as a 1 .5
cubesat size. Right. Literally the size of a
piece of fruit. But looking at the launch manifest
data, there's a number that immediately jumps
out. The listed launch mass is 21 kilograms.
Yeah, that catches a lot of people off guard.
That's 46 pounds. I mean, you cannot physically
pack 46 pounds of material into a five centimeter
sheet metal box unless you are synthesizing dark
matter in a university lab. Right. Well, that
21 kilograms has to be the deployment mechanism
it rode in on. Ah, okay, so it's not the satellite
itself. Exactly. It is the deployment mechanism,
and it's a crucial piece of the engineering reality
for low -cost spaceflight. When you launch a
satellite, you aren't just tossing a piece of
sheet metal out the window of a rocket. Which
would be fun, but probably not very safe. Not
at all. $50 sat was a secondary payload. The
primary payload on these rockets is often a multi
-million dollar piece of highly sensitive equipment.
The launch providers are not going to let a $200
to $50 university project anywhere near their
primary payload unless it is locked inside an
indestructible, spring -loaded casing. Right,
like a deployer. I think the source mentions
a PPOD or a MRFOD. Squad on. So the deployer
is basically a heavy -duty, 46 -pound titanium
jack -in -the -box. It acts as a quarantine box.
That's a perfect way to put it. If the cheap
university satellite rattles apart violently
during the intense vibrations of liftoff, Scrapnel
is safely contained inside the heavy deployer
and doesn't destroy the billion -dollar satellite
sitting next to it. What's fascinating here is
how the massive weight of the deployer highlights
the absolute intentionality behind the $50 Sats
design. The pocket cube chassis requires absolutely
no precision mechanical parts. Which is huge
for the budget. Massive. By building it from
locally obtained sheet metal, they remove the
huge financial and technical gatekeepers that
keep aerospace engineering out of reach for most
schools. Right, because the challenge wasn't
just getting it into orbit. The challenge was
designing something functional that could survive
the journey without relying on custom machined
aerospace -grade titanium. Exactly. So if the
goal is to keep costs absurdly low, you can't
use custom aerospace parts. You have to use off
-the -shelf components. But how do you stop consumer
-grade electronics from instantly frying in the
radiation of space? It's clever engineering.
Because looking at the internal hardware, it
consists of just two 40 millimeter square circuit
boards. It sounds like someone raided a Best
Buy clearance bin and a hardware store to build
a spaceship. It really does. So board number
one is the processor and radio board. It holds
a PCAXE40X2 processor, which is a very common
microcontroller used by hobbyists. Oh, wow. So
very basic. Extremely basic. It also has a Hope
RFM22B transceiver module for communication,
a temperature sensor, and these vital components
called latch up and watchdog protection devices.
OK, wait, I'm looking at the battery specs here.
A 3 .7 volt lithium ion camera battery. Completely
standard. I mean, if I leave my digital camera
in a cold car overnight, the battery drains to
zero. In low Earth orbit, temperatures swing
from searing heat and direct unfiltered sunlight
to hundreds of degrees below zero when the satellite
passes into the Earth's shadow. The thermal cycling
is incredibly harsh. He must have wrapped this
thing in layers of heavy thermal blankets or
used active internal heaters, right? They didn't
heavily insulate it or use active heaters at
all, actually. Wait, really? How did it survive?
They manage the vulnerability electronically.
That's the job of board number two, the solar
power control and monitor board. It utilizes
what are called maximum power point controllers
or MPPTs alongside current monitors. OK, how
does that work? Well, the voltage coming from
a tiny solar panel fluctuates wildly depending
on the angle of the sun and the rapidly changing
temperature in orbit. A standard basic charger
would just waste that power or fail to push it
into the battery. So an MPPT acts like a smart
automatic gearbox. Exactly. If the solar panel
is only getting a weird angle of sunlight, the
MPPT constantly adjusts the electrical resistance
to ring out the maximum possible wattage at any
given millisecond. You've got it. It forces every
available drop of energy into that camera battery
so it doesn't freeze or die during the 45 minutes
of darkness on every orbit. The ingenuity is
just incredible. They're adapting a terrestrial
concept for an extreme environment. The power
management is constantly babysitting the battery
chemistry. It really is. And you brought up the
radiation of space earlier. High -energy particles
zip through commercial silicon in low -Earth
orbit constantly. Which is a huge problem for
standard ships. Huge problem. When a particle
hits a microscopic transistor inside that hobbyist
pike axi processor, it can literally flip a binary
zero to a one. Which causes the processor to
lock up in an infinite loop. It's like when your
laptop freezes and you have to hold the power
button down. Exactly. But there's nobody in space
to hold the power button down. So that must be
what the watchdog timer is doing. That is exactly
what it's doing. The watchdog is a completely
separate, extremely simple ruggedized circuit.
Its only job is to wait for the main processor
to send a regular, I'm alive, signal like a heartbeat.
Oh, that's smart. Right. If the main processor
takes a radiation hit and freezes, that heartbeat
stops. Watchdog timer notices the silence, physically
cuts the power to the main board, and restores
it a moment later. It forces a hard reboot. So
they didn't buy radiation hardened military chips
that cost millions of dollars. They bought cheap
vulnerable chips and then built a separate cheek
circuit whose entire purpose is to constantly
turn the satellite off and back on again whenever
it inevitably crashes. It's brilliant in its
simplicity. That is the ultimate MacGyver engineering.
They accepted that failure would happen and designed
a system to automatically recover from it. It's
smart design overcoming the limitations of cheap
materials. OK, so we have this $250 camera battery
powered sheet metal box that is constantly rebooting
itself and bringing out solar power. The next
question for anyone listening is how did this
little box of scraps actually get to space? And
more importantly, did it work? It absolutely
worked. On November 21st, 2013, $50 Sat launched
from the Dumbrovsky Air Base in Orenburg, Russia.
What kind of rocket was it on? It rode on a Dnieper
rocket, which is essentially a converted Soviet
era intercontinental ballistic missile. Wow.
OK. The launch was part of a larger multinational
deployment called the Unisat 5 satellite program
run by GOS, which is the group of astrodynamics
for the use of space systems. And it gets dropped
off into low Earth orbit. or LEO, the orbital
specs are incredibly precise. They really are.
It had a perigee, which is the closest it gets
to Earth, of 376 kilometers, and an apogee, the
farthest point of 382 kilometers. So it's sitting
in a wonderfully tight circular orbit. Yep. It's
traveling at an inclination of 97 .70 degrees,
completing a full orbit around the entire planet
every 92 minutes. Every 92 minutes. That's so
fast. It was traveling at roughly 17 ,000 miles
per hour. Every hour and a half, it completed
a lap around the globe. And as it made those
laps, it was doing exactly what it was designed
to do, which is communicate telemetry. Right.
It operated in the 70 centimeter amateur radio
band, repeating a specific transmission sequence
every 75 seconds. Here's where it gets really
interesting for anyone listening. You didn't
need a multi -million dollar government dish
in the desert to hear this thing. Not at all.
Imagine standing in your backyard on a Tuesday
night. You have a basic handheld ham radio you
bought online. You tune it to the 70 centimeter
band and suddenly through the static you hear
a slow Morse code beep. You are literally receiving
a message from a piece of sheet metal flying
overhead at 17 ,000 miles an hour. Is this essentially
the satellite equivalent of texting Earth with
Morse code? Essentially, yes. The satellite transmitted
an FM slow Morse call sign beacon. If the satellite
was about 800 kilometers away or closer, that
simple handheld UHF receiver in your backyard
was entirely sufficient to pick it up. That is
so cool. But if you wanted to track it from further
away, you needed slightly better hardware, right?
Correct. The documentation mentions listeners
upgrading to a BiQuad, a Moxon, or a small Yagi
antenna to improve the signal. For you listening,
if a standard omnidirectional antenna on a handheld
radio is like a bare light bulb shining in all
directions, a Yagi antenna is like a focused
flashlight beam. That's a great vision. You have
to physically point it right at the satellite
as it moves across the sky, but that focused
beam allows the signal to reach much further.
And that directional focus allowed operators
to receive far more than just the slow morse
code. $50 sat was transmitting actual data telemetry.
It used something called FSK RTTY data. Right.
FSK stands for frequency shift keying, and RTTY
is radio teletype. It's essentially shifting
the frequency up and down slightly to represent
binary ones and zeros. Exactly. If you've ever
heard the screeching sound of an old dial -up
internet modem connecting, you've heard a form
of frequency shift keying. It was broadcasting
its vital health statistics, the battery voltage,
the internal temperature, the solar panel output.
This FSK RTTY data was successfully decoded at
distances up to roughly 2 ,400 kilometers away.
Yeah, provided the listener had a good omnidirectional
antenna and a low noise amplifier to filter out
the background static of space. And it goes even
further than that. The pinnacle of its communication
was sending digital data telemetry packets moving
at one kilobit per second. The T -Logo Coupe
team reported that by using a high gain Yagi
tracking antenna, basically a very precise, very
powerful flashlight beam, they were able to send
and receive these data packets at an astonishing
range of up to 20 Which is incredible. The varying
ranges from 800 kilometers on a basic handheld
radio to 2 ,700 kilometers using a precise Yagi
setup proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that
the satellite could broadcast effectively. And
that regular people could talk to it. Exactly.
It demonstrated that a global community of amateur
radio operators could successfully interact with
orbital hardware using incredibly accessible,
relatively cheap ground equipment. It's a staggering
achievement. 2 ,700 kilometers of range from
a $250 metal box the size of a piece of fruit.
Which brings us to the natural conclusion of
any piece of technology running on a battery.
Right, eventually it has to end. We've tracked
the MacGyver -like construction, the Soviet -era
ICBM launch, and the massive communication success.
But eventually, the laws of physics and battery
chemistry dictate that the ride is over. The
operational mission of $50 SAD lasted a solid
one year and eight months. Throughout that time,
it endured thousands of extreme thermal cycles,
just freezing and baking every 92 minutes. So
what does this all mean? Because it wasn't hit
by a micrometeor and it didn't immediately burn
up in the atmosphere. It simply ran out of juice.
Yeah, the battery just couldn't hold the charge
anymore. After facing months of issues with degrading
battery voltage, $50 set finally dropped below
a critical threshold of 3 .3 volts on July 19th,
2015. At that point, the processor just didn't
have enough power to run the transceiver. It
lost its ability to transmit data and ceased
operations. It's a quiet end to a loud mission.
We've all experienced that universally frustrating
moment of watching your smartphone battery hit
1 % and the screen just goes black mid -text.
It's strangely poignant to link that everyday
annoyance to the literal death of a spacecraft.
The voltage dropped below 3 .3 the chemistry
gave out and it went to sleep. The physical end
came a bit later, though. The silent satellite
remained in its decaying orbit for a few more
years, slowly being dragged down by the microscopic
particles in the upper atmosphere. Until it finally
burned up upon reentry on May 19th, 2018. Right.
If we connect this to the bigger picture, the
inevitable depletion of that lithium ion battery
is entirely overshadowed by the monumental success
of the mission itself. Because it proved the
concept. It was a massive stress test for the
pocket cube standard. $50 SAT was the very first
of the new pocket cube standard satellites to
be launched, riding alongside others like T -Logo
Kube, Quibscout S1, and Wren. It didn't just
survive, it thrived for over a year and a half.
It permanently proved that very low cost, incredibly
small satellites are completely viable in low
Earth orbit. It fundamentally altered the landscape
for STEM education. Because the barrier to entry
has just completely evaporated, a low build cost
of less than $250 means that functional space
-ready engineering models are now readily affordable
for high schools, community colleges, and amateur
radio clubs. Exactly. Students no longer have
to just read about space engineering in a textbook
or watch a live stream of a government agency
doing it. They can actually bend the sheet metal,
solder the watchdog circuits, and participate
in it directly. It completely democratizes access
to low -res orbit. It bridges the gap between
theoretical physics and applied engineering for
students who otherwise would never have the budget
to touch aerospace hardware. The next time you
look up at the night sky, I really want you to
remember that space isn't just the domain of
billionaires, massive government budgets, and
impenetrable clean rooms anymore. The exclusive
club has had its doors kicked open. It really
has. Orbit is also home to brilliant, scrappy
student projects made of local sheet metal, off
-the -shelf camera batteries, and clearance b
- processors. It's entirely accessible. This
raises an important question to consider though.
$50 satellites successfully prove that a $250
budget and some rigorous ingenuity is all it
takes to put a functional communicating satellite
into low Earth orbit. Right. But if the financial
and technical barriers to space are now officially
this low, What happens a decade from now? Oh,
that's a good point. If every college, every
high school STEM class, and every dedicated amateur
radio hobbyist on Earth can suddenly afford to
build and launch their own piece of orbital real
estate, how will humanity manage the ultimate
traffic jam in the sky? Now there's a thought
to keep you up at night. You start with a $250
box of parts in a university lab and you end
up completely redefining who gets to claim the
stars and how crowded those stars are about to
become. Thanks for joining us on this deep dive.