The Spacecraft Challenge: A Student Satellite Program Accelerator

Brigham Young University’s first smallsat project, like many university smallsat projects, faced significant personnel challenges. The time required for inexperienced undergraduates to become contributing team members, combined with moderate turnover, caused overruns in the budget and schedule. To find and train future team members for employment, the student team formed a club and instituted a peer-mentored, introductory-level challenge to design, build, and fly a miniature, fully-functional model spacecraft, in one semester. At very low cost, two annual rounds of the challenge provided more than 30 students with full-cycle, design-to-flight engineering experience. Leveraging this introductory experience, many participants have now contributed to more advanced smallsat projects. We describe the low-cost project and implementation of the challenge format along with recommendations for starting similar programs at other schools