NASA had 86,000 satellite designs to choose from and picked one built for about $1,500 by a teenager in rural India — at 64 grams it was the lightest satellite ever sent to space, and its whole job was to prove that a 3D-printed satellite could survive the ride

The satellite that lifted off from NASA’s Wallops Island facility on June 22, 2017 would have been easy to lose in a coat pocket. It was a cube less than four centimeters on a side, weighing 64 grams, lighter than a smartphone, lighter than a hen’s egg, and it had been designed not in a cleanroom in Pasadena or Bangalore but in Pallapatti, a small town in the Karur district of Tamil Nadu, by an 18-year-old named Rifath Sharook.

It was, at launch, the lightest satellite ever flown, and its budget would not have covered the catering on a normal space program: roughly one lakh rupees, about $1,500.

The competition

The route from Pallapatti to a NASA launch pad ran through a contest called Cubes in Space, run by an education organization with NASA’s support, which invites school students worldwide to design experiments that can fly on a NASA sounding rocket or balloon, with one brutal constraint: the entire payload must fit in a tiny cube and meet a strict weight limit. The 2017 cycle drew a reported 86,000 entries from students in dozens of countries, and from that pile the selectors took Sharook’s design.

Sharook was no casual entrant. The son of a science teacher who had raised him on the night sky, he had won a national young-scientist prize at 15 for a helium weather balloon, and he was working as lead scientist with Space Kidz India, a Chennai outfit run by Srimathy Kesan that exists to put ambitious students on exactly this kind of stage. For the NASA contest, his team designed a femto-satellite, the smallest class of spacecraft there is, and named it KalamSat, after A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, the rocket-engineer president of India who spent his later years telling schoolchildren to aim implausibly high.

The material is the mission

What made KalamSat more than a stunt was its scientific job, which was elegantly self-referential: the satellite’s payload was, in large part, the satellite itself. Its structure was 3D-printed from reinforced carbon fibre polymer, and the mission’s stated purpose was to demonstrate how that printed material performed through the violence of a rocket flight, the launch loads, the vibration, the temperature swings, and the minutes of microgravity at the top of the arc. Packed inside the little cube were an indigenous onboard computer and eight built-in sensors measuring acceleration, rotation and Earth’s magnetic field, the instrumentation of a full-sized spacecraft shrunk to the mass of a few coins.

The logic mattered beyond the contest. Satellites are expensive substantially because their structures are exotically manufactured and exhaustively qualified; if a structure can simply be printed and still take the ride, the price of entry to space drops for everyone, most of all for schools and small nations. KalamSat’s flight was a 240-minute suborbital mission on a Terrier-Orion sounding rocket, with around 12 minutes in microgravity before the payload came back down for recovery and analysis, and by the team’s account the printed cube did its one job: it survived.

The sequel reached orbit

The 2017 flight was suborbital, up and down, which left an obvious itch unscratched, and the team scratched it eighteen months later. In January 2019, ISRO, India’s space agency, carried KalamSat-V2, a 1.26-kilogram successor built by Sharook, Mohammed Abdul Kashif and the Space Kidz team, into orbit on a PSLV rocket, where it operated as a ham-radio communications satellite. Indian officials celebrated it as the lightest satellite ever placed in orbit, built in six days at a small fraction of conventional cost, and ISRO flew it free of charge, using the rocket’s spent fourth stage as an orbital platform for the first time. The student experiment had graduated into the national program.

Sharook’s own line about the project has always pointed past the hardware. The team researched cube satellites worldwide, found nothing lighter, and concluded that the record was available to whoever cared to claim it, which is a fair summary of the whole affair. Nothing about KalamSat required a billion-dollar agency: a contest with an open door, a printer, a $1,500 budget, a teenager with a specific obsession, and an organization willing to back him. The most advanced space administration on Earth reviewed tens of thousands of designs and sent up the one from Pallapatti, and the little printed cube’s message, delivered at 64 grams, was aimed less at engineers than at every student who assumed the door was locked. It never weighed much. It just needed to survive the ride, and it did.

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