Dealing with failure and the next steps

Dealing with Failure

Unfortunately, during launch, Astra’s ELaNa 41 mission lost control after 2nd stage separation and only reached an apogee of around 400 km before releasing the cubesat payloads and dropping back to earth. Cubesats were deployed roughly 100 km short of target orbit and with nowhere near the orbital velocity necessary.

Despite this, I, along with the rest of my Qubesat team, wanted to express our gratitude to both Astra and NASA for giving us college kids an opportunity to send a satellite into space in the first place. We derived value from this project through the process, and the end result would have just been a perk. This project brought together a group of students united under a common interest in space and turned them into an effective team of engineers, but more importantly an inseparable group of friends. Though it is cliche, I am sure that decades down the road, I won’t remember the day we failed to reach orbit. I will remember biking home at 2 AM after an evening of assembly in our makerspace. I will remember losing my mind over the success rate of our antenna deployment system. I will remember all the laser cutting, 3-D printing, and finger-callusing grunt work that turned our idea into reality. And I will certainly remember all the interactions I had with my teammates, whether that be arguing over design merits or grabbing burritos after a meeting, that built us all up to be better team players and engineers.

To Astra, I say “don’t worry about it”. To us, rockets are fun, to you it is your livelihood. Thank you for providing us with the opportunity to launch in the first place. Thank you for welcoming us into you headquarters and showing us the behind-the-scenes of getting to space. Most importantly, thank you for giving us our first taste of “Space is Hard”. Failure, especially in the industry, is almost inevitable, and as aspiring engineers in the field, we must learn to deal with it. Your resilience and perseverance will serve as an inspiration for when we run into our own obstacles in the future.

What’s Next?

Fortunately, Qubesat is not history! Here is where we’re headed:

1. STAR launch collaboration: STAR (Space Technologies and Rocketry) is a sister club here at Berkeley that focuses on launching and recovering their own single-stage rockets. We will be providing a payload similar to Qubesat. For us, any launch opportunity is welcome, and for them, they are competing for the “coolest payload”. We will be launching to an altitude of 10,000 feet and recovering our payload in summer 2022.
2. Qubesat v2: Fortunately, NASA’s CSLI team has granted us the opportunity to send an exact replica of Qubesat with the next available launch provider. Basically, this will be a re-do launch for us! Details tbd.
3. Cubesat v2: Our long-term vision is to create another cubesat with a new payload. We will be brainstorming ideas for new payloads (such as solar sails or space junk collectors) and submitting a proposal in Fall of 2022 for the next CSLI cohort.