Design Team: WashU Satellite
Collaborative engineering experience on real space hardware.
In January 2024, my friend Ben came to me with the idea of starting a CubeSat design team, which WashU (unlike many peer universities) didn't have. Being very interested in spaceflight and knowing Ben's incredibly strong skills in engineering and administrative relations I was immediately on board. After recruiting a few other colleagues, we established strong relationships with professors in both engineering and physics and developed the structure of the team, using lessons-learned from our previous design team experiences (mine on WU Rocketry, others on WashU Racing). I took on the role of Chief Mechanical Engineer, organizing and overseeing the mechanical development of all our projects from design conceptualization to final integration. In the Fall of 2024, we grew the mechanical team to 10 members through a competitive recruitment process.
Below I list out and discuss our projects, focusing on my specific contributions. For more information about the projects in general, please visit the WashU Satellite LinkedIn page. You can also contact the team at satelliteteam@wustl.edu - we're always happy to talk to anyone about what we're working on.
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View from camera onboard SB-1
Rough assembly of camera gimbal
SB-1
SB-1 (standing for small balloon 1, we weren't very clever with naming) was a tethered weather balloon mission we flew in May 2025 which demonstrated communications, a simple camera gimbal design, and more broadly our ability as a team to implement a project from start to finish on a short timeframe.
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I completed the majority of the mechanical side of this project, designing and implementing the camera gimbal, board layout, and tethers. Creating the camera gimbal was a great exercise in equation-driven CAD, tolerancing and iterating on 3D printed designs, and improving my understanding of servo motors. With the board layout in addition, I got some great experience in the integration of mechanical and electrical systems. During this time, I also brought on two mechanical members who worked on the parachute deployment system and tether spool.
Ground Station
We're currently building and testing our ground station (GS), which has a rotating UHF yagi antenna design for satellite communications. Over the summer, I worked with my team to research and create a design concept. Breaking the ground station down into different sections, we started working with the responsible engineering model, where each person takes ownership of a certain component, sub-module, or module from start to finish. On GS, I serve as the responsible engineer (RE) on the overall mechanical module and on the antenna component - with other members as REs on the frame, rotator, and enclosure components.
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For the antenna, I worked closely with our Chief Electrical Engineer to provide a mechanically sound solution that would fulfill the specifications required for a high performance antenna. This has included many interesting trade-offs including strength vs. weight, rigidity vs. tunability, manufacturability vs. peak performance, and more. The current design has been validated through analytical calculations and finite element analysis in SolidWorks - with future test plans laid out to ensure the required performances.
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As RE for the overall mechanical design, I've been responsible for ensuring proper integration between all mechanical components and with electrical and software systems. A large part of this has been teaching and helping members understand new concepts, while also giving them the space to come up with their own designs and implementations.
Test antenna setup
Antenna analysis FEA
Lens to be used on AIRIS
AIRIS
AIRIS (ADAPT Incidence Resolution and Imaging System) is a piggyback mission to be flown with ADAPT, a high-altitude research balloon mission over Antarctica. We've developed a strong relationship with Professor Jim Buckley, a WashU physics professor and PI on ADAPT who offered us this slot to conduct optical follow-ups of the gamma ray burst events ADAPT aims to detect and localize.
This fall I brought on new mechanical members ranging from first year to graduate students to accomplish this, and future, projects. Myself and others on the club executive team have created the requirements and systems breakdown of the AIRIS project, and also secured the funding to make it happen.
As Chief Mechanical Engineer, I've taught many new members the fundamental concepts of mechanical engineering and led the design process from concept development to the preliminary design review stage, where members have been assigned as responsible engineers on the various design components. Similarly to the ground station, the majority of my time has been spent teaching, answering any questions people may have, and making sure the designs will integrate correctly.
Future Projects
We currently have a few future projects in the early planning stages. Working with the WashU physics department, we're working on a payload for our first satellite, which will be a 1U CubeSat with the primary goal of demonstrating successful spacecraft design and on-orbit operations.
We recently submitted a CSLI proposal to NASA for a 3U satellite named VECTOR (Versatile Educational Controls Testbed for Optical Response) which will use a lens similar to that of AIRIS to observe transient events. It will also feature configurable searching algorithms to allow our team, and external interested parties, the opportunity to test code on a real spacecraft. I completed the majority of the mechanical sections of the CSLI proposal, in addition to working on the overall mission design.
VECTOR preliminary CAD