A Guide to CubeSat Mission and Bus Design | Hacker News Reader

A Guide to CubeSat Mission and Bus Design

pressbooks-dev.oer.hawaii.edu

87 pointso4c13 comments

I've launched Cubesat missions commercially, and wasn't aware of this text (unclear when it was published). Many of the Space Mission txts are designed around larger (classical) satellite buses and aren't written for "how do you get a payload / mission to LEO for ~$1M" The book is spot on that F' is where it's at for the future of Small Satellites OBFS, the flight computer section is also pretty remarkably helpful - as in this is very practical "how you get it done and here is the history" versus pie in the sky theory. And per other comments, yes, it is rather US centric. Here is the reality, if you are putting a cibesat in orbit, 95% odds your best path is a SpaceX Falcon 9 Rideshare, which means you will be operating with a US FCC Launch license and coordinating with the FCC equivalent in your own country where you which to downlink to. That is the one area the book doesn't cover, Space law. You can get burned easily on "Space lawyers," charging ~$1500/hr to prepare an FCC license, helping you with ITAR (yes many components on a satellite are "arms" technology). If you get to the right person, there are a few small legal service shops in the US that will help you submit your launch license paperwork for a reaosnable fee. And lastly, integration and deployer. Believe it or not, there are foreign nation states (not the US) operating these deployer services that are adjacent to inteligence services that will do everything from spy on you to sabotage your mission if they don't like it (I've had it happen). All in, launching a small satellite is an amazing endeavor, and getting it to orbit and getting first downlink can be a very real challenge. It's an amazing time we live in that we can do such things

I develop spacecraft architectures for work and the spacecraft design bible is Space Mission Engineering: The New SMAD [1]. While much of the information in SMAD can be generalized to cubesats it is focused primarily on larger missions, so its nice to see a book focused on the cubesat space. Briefly flipping through this text, I'm pleasantly surprised at how much theory and context is packed in with application and analysis. The fact that its a free download is such a bonus!

I've been slowly building out a webapp [2] that allows people to design a satellite from scratch, and this book provides a lot of the key technical analyses in a really approachable way. As I build out more of the system trades and analysis modules, I'll definitely be referencing this text to make sure the tools can be utilized from the cubesat perspective.

[1]: https://astrobooks.com/spacemissionengineeringthenewsmadsme-...

[2]: https://vesperastro.com

Like the look of what you're doing with Vesper.

Is your roadmap more "Satsearch for broader range of spacecraft mass classes" or "generate initial mission and spacecraft architecture from simple input parameters"?

Thanks! The goal is for it to be primarily an architecture tool, although right now it leans more towards SatSearch as I think that will get eyes faster and because there needs to be a decently robust component library for the architecture tools to work. The idea is that you can set your primary mission parameters and CONOPs, and then to get immediate feedback on spacecraft performance metrics as you trade/change hardware in the Master Equipment List. Maybe the best way to think of it is as "PCPartPicker for spacecraft".

For example if you add/change a radio transmitter, you can see in real-time how that changes your system mass, power, and link margins, or be alerted if your flight computer doesn't support your radio's data interface.

This (hopefully) lets a spacecraft systems engineer iterate through trades more quickly, track performance and margin evolution over a program lifecycle, or quickly develop a baseline for a given mission class.

Definitely quite a bit of work to go to get there but feel free to create an account and poke around and break things.

very cool! This was quite literally manually scraping manuals and spec sheets, and plugging into excel for me. Rather that be for Size, Weight, Power budget, or even interfaces. I'd love to see a drag and drop tool the plops out an ICD, power budget, etc. One observation I've had on my missions: compatability is often a mess of drivers and just getting components to talk to one another, and the details are behind NDAs and export laws, etc. GRanted, even just solving the early phases of ICD and the general (does this mission fit in an 8U/12U, etc bus), would be a massive help. Very cool project that I could see becoming a paid tool

Appreciate it! Totally agree, your experience is what drove me to start building Vesper in the first place. Not only do you have to find the right hardware and manually scrape the specs, but then any time you change hardware you have to update it across a number of docs - keeping them all synced is a pain. And the alternative is an incredibly time-intensive and bloated MBSE model... My end hope is that Vesper can blend the low barrier-to-entry of an excel analysis with the interconnectedness of an MBSE model.

The goal is to get to exactly what you describe, with drag and drop tools that then basically give you an export of all your interconnects and performance analyses. As you point out, the reality is that the devil is in the details. For now, Vesper is focused mostly on surfacing the high-level, sanity check interface concerns and performance calculations, but I hope it can still add value at the concept definition -> proposal -> PDR phase of a program.

I also agree wholeheartedly with your other comment that some of the biggest challenges are jumping through the regulatory hoops like FCC licensing and range safety, so maybe once I've got the technical stuff limping along I can take a look at how to incorporate that process somewhat.

Yep, It's layer cake of pain, for the joy of getting to orbit. Agree, your approach makes sense to tackle the layer you are on now - which is just the "wiring" I'm in the cUAS space currently with a missile startup (which has many similarities to small sats), with that said, I have some contacts in the Small sat / commercial new space industry that would be interested in this. I also do have a small sat concept I hope to get into orbit when I have the time to make a flat sat prototype to sanity check the payload. Feel free to shoot me an email scott@orcrist.com - would love to stay in touch on this project and see where I can help, and potentially be a customer

For those interested in CubeSats: NASA Small Spacecraft State of the Art Report (2024) https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/soa-2024.pdf...

https://web.archive.org/web/20260427153049/https://pressbook...

CubeSats are being launched around the world. While a compelling effort, this book is rather US-centric, and will be incomplete without some wider research.

In fairness, the CubeSat standard was invented in the US, the physics doesn't change with the location of the design team and things like NASA mission phases are good practice have close analogues elsewhere

A more pertinent point might be that some of the recommendations in here are specific to one particular kit for building CubeSats the authors are responsible for, but for many that will be the appeal...

I also recommend Space Mission Analysis and Design, by Larson, known as SMAD in the industry

Any article/books for disk-sat?

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