Space Flight After School

Over Coffee® is on holiday hiatus.  Please enjoy this rebroadcast of one of our most popular episodes of 2019.
Imagine building a grapefruit-sized satellite that launches into space.

Now, imagine you're doing this as an extracurricular activity--with your fellow high school students.

That's an opportunity which NASA has been giving students at Florida's Merritt Island High School, over the past eight years.

Since 2011, NASA has been working with the students through a Space Act Agreement between Kennedy Space Center and schools in Florida’s Brevard County.   The resulting STEM program allowed students to work under the guidance of NASA engineers.

At first, Merritt Island High's satellite was supposed to be, simply, a mock-up.  But the project grew from there.

Until, on June 25, 2019, a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket lifted off Kennedy Space Center's launch pad with Merritt Island High’s StangSat on board, as part of its cargo.

According to NASA’s webpage, StangSat is part of the Department of Defense’s  Space Test Program-2 mission.   StangSat is designed to measure the shock and vibration of a launch, while communicating with a sister satellite, Launch Environment Observer, or LEO, which students at Cal Poly built.

The satellite's name comes from the school's mascot, the mustang.  Their satellite is a CubeSat, designed to fly in space for a number of years.

During Podcast Movement 2019, in Orlando, we had the opportunity to talk with NASA Electronics Engineer and Bid and Proposal Manager Kelvin Ruiz, who served as StangSat’s main software mentor, and with NASA Integration Engineer Shaun Daly, lead mentor on the StangSat project.

Kelvin and Shaun shared the story of StangSat, offered a behind-the-scenes look at the process of building the cube satellite and shared their favorite experiences from their time spent mentoring the students.
On this edition of Over Coffee®,you will hear:

What first inspired Kelvin and Shaun to become engineers in the space-exploration field;

How the StangSat project evolved from a simple design project to real-world engineering;

Some of the challenges Kelvin and Shaun saw the student team encounter while building StangSat;

What was involved for the students, while working on the project;

What kinds of tasks the students could perform, during the process;

How the StangSat project led some of the participating students to their future careers;

What StangSat is currently doing in space.