Is the drag much better than a regular cubesat? It doesn't look tremendously aerodynamic. From the description I was kind of expecting a design that minimized frontal area.
>Additional surface treatments will improve drag coefficient further.
Is surface drag that much of a contributor at orbital velocity?
Yes it's a big contributor. The atmosphere in VLEO behaves as free molecular flow instead of a continuous fluid.
> It is undesirable to have a definition that will change with improving technology, so one might argue that the correct way to define space is to pick the lowest altitude at which any satellite can remain in orbit, and thus the lowest ballistic coefficent possible should be adopted - a ten-meter-diameter solid sphere of pure osmium, perhaps, which would have B of 8×10^−6 m^2/kg and an effective Karman line of z(-4) at the tropopause