Keeping Amateur Radio in Space - 21St Century Challenges and Opportunities for AMSAT
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Keeping Amateur Radio in Space - 21st Century Challenges and Opportunities for AMSAT Daniel Schultz N8FGV [email protected] The amateur radio in space program began on December 12, 1961, when members of Project OSCAR built and launched the OSCAR 1 satellite as a secondary payload on the US Air Force Discoverer 36 mission. This was the world's first satellite built with non-governmental funds and the first deployment of a secondary satellite from a launch vehicle. The political and bureaucratic effort to obtain approval for launch greatly exceeded the technical effort in building the satellite (1), but it created the precedent for launching secondary payloads and thus played a part in creating the small satellite industry that we know today. The political effort to secure launch approval was aided by several well-connected hams in the Pentagon, who convinced their superiors that the small amount of added risk to the primary mission in carrying a secondary satellite was worth accepting. It is good to have friends in high places who believe in your vision when you are trying to propose something so ridiculous as an “amateur satellite” OSCAR 1 replica on display at the National Air and Space Museum Udvar-Hazy center A long series of OSCAR satellites followed in the 1960's through the 1990's, culminating in the launch of the 600 kg AMSAT-OSCAR-40 with a live hypergolic propulsion system in November 2000. Many were launched at little or no cost to the amateurs who built them, but the success of these amateur satellites attracted the attention of government, universities and business. Soon a thriving enterprise of small satellite organizations sprang up and demand for secondary launches grew exponentially. Commercial launch providers learned that they could actually charge money for these formerly "free" launches. The road to space gradually closed for amateur organizations funded by member donations. The German Phase 3E amateur satellite languished for well over a decade as efforts to find an affordable launch were fruitless. AMSAT's “Eagle” project, a proposed 100 kg high altitude satellite to replace some of OSCAR-40's functionality, never got close to finding a launch. In the late 1990's AMSAT member Bob Twiggs of Stanford University proposed the first "CubeSat" standard in an effort to secure rapid and low cost launch opportunities for his students. His idea was to define a standard external form factor to allow interchangeable satellites to be launched in a sealed box that would protect the primary payload from harm if the enclosed CubeSat should disintegrate from launch vibrations on ascent to orbit. The standard “1U” CubeSat was ten centimeters (four inches) on a side, which made them even smaller than AMSAT's 25 centimeter (ten inch) “Microsats” that were first launched in the 1990's. Soon every university on Earth was building their own CubeSat. Their students got to participate in a real satellite mission, and some of those students got to see their satellite launched into space before they graduated. The satellite was generally considered successful if the students delivered a working CubeSat to the launch authority, whether it functioned correctly on orbit was an incidental consideration. CubeSats proved to be popular with the aerospace industry which saw them as a way to increase the supply of young engineering talent that they could hire upon graduation. Space missions that might have carried an OSCAR satellite in earlier years were now full of CubeSat dispensers, and the amateur satellite program fell even more out of favor. Things got even worse for AMSAT in the late 1990's when the US Congress passed legislation creating the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), which classifies every little piece of spacecraft hardware as a dangerous munitions item that must not fall into the hands of an enemy nation. As a result of ITAR, AMSAT was now an international munitions dealer! This program was administered by the US Department of State, a disfunctional bureaucracy that really doesn't understand the concept of satellites built by hobbyists. ITAR restricts not just the movement of actual space hardware, but every new idea or concept for any spacecraft mission is now restricted information that must not be communicated to any “non-US person”, even in informal settings like the hallways and lounges at the annual AMSAT Space Symposium. ITAR has forced AMSAT-North America to disengage from other AMSAT organizations around the world, and destroyed the international cooperation that made complex projects possible. AMSAT- OSCAR-40 was a collaboration of AMSAT organizations from a dozen different countries in a 1990's pre-ITAR environment. Building this satellite would have been impossible under present day ITAR rules. In one recent year AMSAT spent more money on legal fees than it spent on satellites. In the past couple of years Congress has lightened up on some of the more onerous aspects of ITAR, but AMSAT is still bound by restrictions on dissemination of technical ideas and concepts, to the point where we must restrict membership in AMSAT's engineering team to US citizens only. In 2007 NASA created the “Educational Launch of Nanosatellites” (ELaNa) program (2) to manifest free CubeSat launches for educational institutions on every US Government sponsored launch that has excess lift capacity. AMSAT's own Tony Monteiro, AA2TX (SK) played a key role in convincing NASA to open the program to non profit organizations like AMSAT. A lot of AMSAT folks considered these four inch cubes to be much too small to enable any kind of “interesting” mission, but when that is all you have you can either sit back and complain about your bad luck or you can get to work. AMSAT chose the latter path and started work on the FOX program in 2009, which led to the first launch of the FOX-1 CubeSat (now AMSAT-OSCAR-85) this past October 8, 2015 as a passenger on a US Government launch (3). Two more FOX satellites have completed testing and will soon be delivered to the government for launch, and additional satellites are on the way (4,5). AMSAT FOX-1 satellite launched October 8, 2015 NASA's ELaNa program was not created for hams to launch communications satellites. In order to obtain a launch from NASA, our satellite must carry a scientific or technological payload that fulfills one of NASA's technical or educational objectives. AMSAT has partnered with Vanderbilt University to carry a small radiation effects experiment (“RadFX”) that will measure the degradation of modern semiconductor devices in the space environment, this engineering payload provided the technical hook that allowed the FOX satellite to obtain a government sponsored launch. The FOX satellite is often referred to by the RadFX name in NASA publications. The University of Iowa recently partnered with AMSAT on a scientific payload for Fox-1D (6). We continue to seek partnerships with science and technology organizations to place their small payloads on an AMSAT satellite in return for a NASA sponsored launch. CubeSats have been getting larger in recent years, with 3U (10x10x30 cm) satellites now common, and a number of 6U (10x20x30 cm) missions in the planning stage. This relieves some of the constraints on performance but it will still be challenging to fit the functionality of previous AMSAT satellites into a box that small. New missions for AMSAT The usual AMSAT suspects lined up in front of the Millennium Space Systems Aquila M8 Satellite An opportunity has recently surfaced for AMSAT to place a hosted payload on an experimental geosynchronous satellite to be built for the US Air Force (7). Work is now underway to build a software defined radio transponder with 5.65 GHz uplink and 10.475 GHz downlink under tight deadline pressure. The digital transponder will support more simultaneous users than any HF band at any given time, and the use of SDR technology will allow new transponder functions to be created in code and installed onboard the satellite after it is in orbit. A geosynchronous satellite will remain in a fixed location in the sky and will be available 24 hours a day, enabling the practical use of an amateur satellite for public service and emergency communications for the first time ever. AMSAT has partnered with Ragnarok Industries (8) to provide a similar communications system for their Lunar CubeQuest Challenge (CQC) entry for which they are competing for a launch slot on the first flight of the NASA Space Launch System in 2018. The mission will attempt to transmit data from lunar orbit in pursuit of several cash prizes that NASA is offering, and the satellite can be turned over for amateur radio use from lunar orbit when the primary mission is completed. It will use the same uplink and downlink bands as the geosynchronous satellite project. AMSAT-DL and Virginia Tech recently announced a partnership in which the university will modify the Phase 3E satellite that has been in storage for well over a decade and launch that satellite directly into an elliptical Molniya orbit on a US Government launch (9). Because of the sensitive nature of the primary mission, details about this launch may not be forthcoming until the satellite is actually in orbit! Ragnarok Industries design of a 6U CubeSat for lunar orbit in 2018 CubeSats in HEO? Low Earth Orbit (LEO) missions offer very short pass durations and a limited number of users. Hams would like to have another High Earth Orbit (HEO) satellite like AO-10, AO-13, or AO-40. Ideally we would be able to launch a new satellite every few years to replenish the constellation as older satellites fail.