About Fly Your Satellite!

CubeSats are nanosatellites of standardised dimensions, composed of one or more units that are 10x10x10cm in size and that have a mass of up to 1.33kg. Smaller in size and faster to develop than bigger classes of satellites, CubeSats are the ideal tool to gain practical experience in the full lifecycle of an actual space project. 

PocketQubes are picosatellites also of standardised dimensions, based on a cubic-shaped form factor of cubes with 5 cm sides (one eighth the volume of a CubeSat). Simpler to design and produce than CubeSats, PocketQubes broaden horizons to access space, shifting the focus from technical and scientific investigation to different and new disciplines, such as outreach and training. 

Within the Fly Your Satellite! programme, students have the unique opportunity to get introduced to the working methods adopted in professional space programmes by participating in their own student satellite project, whose mission is conceived at their own tertiary education institutions, and whose development is funded by themselves. 

The student team led projects are guided by ESA specialists through the different programme phases, following the typical development cycle of a space mission. This involves manufacturing, assembling, integrating and testing of their spacecraft, all aiming at ensuring the satellites undergo accurate verification. Simultaneously, students must prepare the documentation required to pass ESA technical reviews, and are then responsible for preparing for the launch campaign and operating their small satellite in orbit, ensuring also that its disposal will be in compliance with the space debris mitigation requirements. 

Student teams need to pass project reviews to advance to each subsequent phase and the launch will only be offered by ESA to those teams that demonstrate the readiness of their spacecraft and ground segment and compatibility with the technical and safety requirements. Once in orbit, teams are supported in the operational phase and will share mission data and technical or scientific results. 

During the course of the programme, satellite student teams receive professional expert support, access to state-of-the-art test facilities; financial support to participate in workshops, training and test sessions organised in the frame of the programme; sponsorship to their participation in the launch campaign; and a launch opportunity, for those who demonstrate the readiness of their spacecraft and ground segment and compatibility with the technical and safety requirements. With this, the Fly Your Satellite! programme is the most thorough educational initiative to date in support of student satellite projects.

Fly Your Satellite! is part of the ESA Academy and makes use of dedicated facilities located at ESA’s Education Centre in ESEC-Galaxia (Belgium): the Training and Learning Facility, where training courses will be offered; and the CubeSat Support Facility, a cleanroom laboratory with test facilities. 

To address the different needs of educational CubeSat developers, the programme has recently expanded with two new opportunities. The FYS Design Booster was opened for teams with a preliminary design frozen, who want to benefit from the support from ESA for the consolidation of the detailed design. And Test Opportunities was opened for teams who would like to put their item (e.g. CubeSat, satellite subsystem, payloads, experiments…) through an environmental test campaign. 

Complementary to the hands-on programme, the ESA Education Office offers training weeks dedicated to CubeSats in collaboration with the ESA Academy’s Training and Learning Programme. The training weeks particularly aim at students and teams in early phases of CubeSat projects, and include a CubeSats Concurrent Engineering Workshop, a CubeSat Hands-On Training Week, and the latest initiative, the CubeSat Summer School. More information about these sessions can be found on the ESA Academy’s training sessions in the Current and Future opportunities website.  

Are you interested in participating in the next Fly Your Satellite! cycle? You can access all the information about this programme at the very bottom of the Fly Your Satellite! website.