Our Launch Timeline
All the notable milestones we made up to now!
All the notable milestones we made up to now!
In July, we will be saying our final goodbyes to the project. Sailing to the Stars will be set aboard the ISS for testing, finally entering space.
In May, the team will be delivering the hardware to Houston for final reviews and to prepare for launch.
The team completed the final internal hardware review before launch. No major issues were found, meaning the project was ready to enter the assembly and testing phase.
The team hit their first major milestone: presenting an update on the deployer design, electrical system layout and software overview, and the state of the reaction wheel. They received valuable feedback from reviewers that allowed them to solidify their plan and move forward with the project.
The Sailing to the Stars project officially began in November 2023, inspired by Alpha CubeSat, a sister project within the Space Systems Design Studio research lab. The team wanted to better understand exactly how the light sail architecture that was first used for that mission works. There are questions they had that couldn't be answered with Alpha alone, questions that were crucial in further figuring out how best to deploy and use these light sails effectively. The primary goal was to better understand the dynamics of the sail deployment - how would the sail and the deployer CubeSat separate? Would the sail be floppy or rigid? Would it spin stably or tumble? Would the deployer itself tumble after sail ejection? The mission objectives for Alpha did not encompass these questions, paving the way for a new microgravity experiment. So came Sailing to the Stars, a project intended to take light sail technology one step closer to solar system exploration and beyond.
