They have had to scramble to find workspace and can only meet for a few hours every other weekend, but the SilverSat team is working through a punch list of projects to get their cubesat into space. The scrappy team of middle- and high school students from Silver Spring, Bethesda and the District of Columbia have settled into their new workspace in the Rockville library and are multi-tasking to raise the cash they need to move forward while also solving the hard engineering problems of fitting a camera, radio, power center and electronics into a 10 cm cube. 
Their goal: build a cubesat that can deliver tweets and photographs from orbit and interact with an audience on the ground. The mission is to develop a passion for STEM subjects among teens, and pass along their learning and motivation to future teens and tweens. The team of 22 students completed a merit review in July 2019 with reviewers including Nicky Fox, Heliophysics Division Director in the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters. They got a long list of action items to work through before a feasibility review set for May. The process is giving the students a real taste of what it takes to get into space. 
One problem they found easy to solve was nailing down just how their satellite would interact with the general public. The team quickly agreed that social media was an obvious choice, and they have settled on a plan to have the satellite live-tweet pictures from orbit. At their latest meeting, they decided to encourage Twitter followers to submit requests for pictures to be taken as the cubesat passes over various landmarks. Planning for this opened up a batch of new questions to answer. How can they best plot the satellite’s orbit and plan ahead for when it will be over a specific area? How can they entice followers to submit ideas for picture from space? How do they decide which requests to fulfill? Are there issues of privacy or security to take into consideration? The team is also working with computer modeling software to figure out the best way to fit a camera into the satellite, along with the accompanying wiring. They had to ditch one camera candidate and find one that would work in the extreme cold temperatures of space. Then work had to start all over again on fitting the new camera into the 10 cm cubic space along with all the other hardware. Separate teams are working up a risk matrix, predicting what might go wrong and what those problems would mean. One for-instance: “If the camera stops working, we won’t have any images to transmit,” said Elijah Overby, a sophomore at Northwood High School who is working on avionics and risk management. Other challenges: Will the boards fit into the cube? Is it possible to tweet from a radio link? What if the solar arrays break down? The students have broken off into teams to finish the tasks. They include groups working on flight software, payload, power, computing, avionics, flight control, social media, and project management. They’ve taught themselves computer programming, digital modeling, 3-D printing and learned how to solder together electronics boards. Project manager Chloe Rutledge has found the hardest task in managing the red tape. “I was not prepared for all the paperwork,” said Rutledge, a sophomore at Wheaton High School. “Plus the challenge of organizing and motivating a team of teenagers.” Possibly the hardest lesson: Many, if not all, of the current team may be working on a project they cannot themselves complete. The satellite may not make it into space by the time the older team members graduate from high school. Progress is slow because they are not part of a school-sponsored team that can meet daily. Instead, the team members travel from more than a dozen different middle and high schools across the region to work together. But they benefit from having parent sponsors with an inside track. David Copeland, who helped set up the group, works in the Space Exploration Sector at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab. Another sponsor is Nathan Edwards, a professor of bioinformatics at Georgetown University. One big setback came when the team’s workspace, Silver Spring Catylator, closed at the end of 2018. It took some searching to secure a new home at the Rockville Library Makerspace, a public workroom equipped with tools, storage and workbenches. But the team has successfully built a prototype and is now building a second. Last summer, they launched their first prototype on a drone and tweeted pictures as it flew. They’ve also managed to send tweets via wi-fi link. Another challenge is raising money. The team estimates they will need $60,000 to complete the project. They have raised about half that amount and learned early in March they had been granted $4,000 from the Maryland Space Business Roundtable (MSBR), a nonprofit organization for aerospace and technology businesses, universities, and individuals. The team has also set up a GoFundMe to raise additional funds to help fund their quest to go to space. Donations are also accepted via PayPal