A bunch of us took a class called ENGN1760: The Design of Space Systems, taught by Rick Fleeter. Rick is a true spacelord engineer through and through (among his many achievements: he invented and launched a precursor system to GPS) so he’s- as you’d imagine- pretty well connected. He came into a launch opportunity and passed it on to the class.

At the end of the semester, four of us decided to keep going and build the project into what it is today. We grew the team to ~40 folks at Brown, and then another ~25 folks elsewhere in the world who were consulting/helping out/working with our launch provider. No one got paid- everyone did this out of the love of the game. Pretty amazing.

We aren’t the first folks to put a drag sail on a satellite but we are likely the first folks to do it as cheaply and quickly as we did it. Our hope is that the satellite demonstrates that deorbiting is not expensive, from both a financial and mass perspective. The system cost maybe $150 and weighs ~$250 grams. In the space world, that’s pretty damn good. About $140 of that build cost was the Kapton film- that stuff is expensive!- so if someone were to find a more affordable space-safe material, the system could be made far more cheaply. I would love to see that.