By Kezia Bryant

“It was a somber moment to realize Kentucky wouldn’t make it to space that day,” said Chris Gleim, a senior computer engineering and computer science major and part of the U of L KySat team.

Graduate and undergraduate students from the University of Louisville Speed School worked to design the orbital satellite for Space Express, part of the KySat program, along with students from other Kentucky universities. The teams traveled to White Sands, N.M. for the launch on Dec. 5, 2007.

“This project is important for U of L as it is one of the major efforts in the state to have collaborative research and development activities across several Kentucky universities and colleges,” said Dr. Rommohan K. Ragade, U of L advisor on the project.

Gleim said that a lot of student hours went into the design and launch, and they received nothing but praise from the professionals they worked with.

Before leaving for New Mexico, the student teams had performed many tests on the ground station and the onboard flight software, and after many hours of testing communications with the ground stations, were very confident in their instrumentation.

“The most memorable moments were when the countdown began,” said Ragade. “[It] was reminiscent of the moments most of us have seen in NASA’s launches at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.”

From Gleim’s viewpoint, along with the other students, who were approximately five miles from the launch site, they could not see any signs of trouble visually. The only evidence of possible problems was when they did not receive the data packet from the Space Express every 1.5 seconds as expected.

The initial news was confirmed by the ground station closer to the launch site that something had gone wrong with the launch vehicle.

The Space Express, according to Gleim, is a dart that it is launched by a booster rocket, and then the dart separates and uses the upward momentum to make it into space.?

On further review the teams found the cause of the problem. “We discovered that approximately 2.2 seconds after the launch, there was apparently separation between the rocket booster and the dart itself.” Shortly afterward, radar picked up debris from the dart.

The problem with the rocket booster was not with a student-designed part of the launch, according to Gleim.

From a student standpoint, their hardware not only worked, but survived the apparent break up of the dart itself and still managed to transmit a packet to the ground station.

“When the rocket went up and we started getting communication packets, we knew our designs worked,” said Ragade. “Here, the communication systems and the payloads were designed by our students. The rocket was provided by a commercial company,” he said.

“After about five to ten minutes, when we heard the voices of our students in the safe bunker, we knew they were safe.”

Ragade, a professor in the computer science and computer engineering department at Speed said the launch event was extremely beneficial to students to understand the significance of careful planning and the execution of such a major event. The main goal of the project is to raise interest in engineering, starting by involving students from as early as high school.?

Phillip Shepard, a sophomore mechanical engineering major said, “It would look good on my resume and it would be fun.”

Kentucky is paving the way to integrating love of learning and appreciation of engineering by giving students the opportunity to become a part of making history.?

According to Ragade, Ky-Sat is working on another “actual launch mission” set for 2008. “The field of engineering advances with each successive experiment, utilizing the knowledge from both successes and failures.”

In the end, the fact that Space Express did not make it to space is of little significance to the KySat project as a whole, said Gleim, adding that the experience gained in New Mexico and dealing with the White Sands Missile Range staff will be indispensable.?

“We just have to realize that there is inherent risk in any space project. NASA’s Project Mercury experienced several launch failures at the beginning of the program, and eventually succeeded in putting the first American in space.”