Starting a Student Satellite Project

More often than not, as soon as you start dreaming about your own satellite orbiting the globe, reality hits you hard. You are bombarded with questions:

• From where will you get the funds?
• From where will you get the technical knowledge required to build a satellite?
• How do you recruit team members who are as enthusiastic about satellite building as you are?
• How will you get the required infrastructure?

and a lot more. Once reality poses these questions, many dreams die down without ever seeing the light of the day. While starting off a project of this scale can be difficult, it is certainly not impossible. A number of universities have done it. You can too!
This wiki can help, to some extent, with the technical knowledge related to building a satellite. Funds could be obtained through various sources like university grants, sponsorships, Government grants etc. Obtaining the funds comes at a later stage and depends on a lot of factors like the strength of your idea (concept, feasibility, application, impact etc.), the readiness of the team and the quality of your pitch. For the rest of the questions, we can provide certain guidelines. These guidelines can be roughly segmented into the following sections:

• Building the Team
• Planning the mission and finalizing the Payload
• Identifying the System and Introduction to Systems Engineering
• Systems Engineering Life Cycle
  • Concept Phase
  • Development Phase
  • Production Phase
  • Utilization and Support Phase
  • Retirement Phase
• Quality Assurance
• Obtaining the required Infrastructure

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If you are done reading the articles in this segment, you can go back to Satellite 101.