I've long said that what NASA needs is not a James Webb Space Telescope but an actual James Webb for the 21st century. Webb, if you are not familiar with NASA lore, was a bold leader rather than a…

Calliope, like any Low Earth Orbit satellite (LEO), is going up to, well, LEO.  Space weather-- radiation and energetic particles emitted from an active Sun-- can damage satellites.  This…

Into every satellite a little grunt work must fall.  Today you get to read the exceedingly boring but entirely real details of a typical week of satellite construction and project management.…

Fellow Tubesat pioneer Wesley Faler of Fluid&Reason has calculated power curves we can expect for our orbiting picosatellites.  His summarized estimate is that 6-cell solar panel in a sun-…

'Project Calliope' will have a nearly circular polar low-earth orbit... but what does that actually mean?  Here's a brief mini course in orbital mechanics. Any orbit requires 6 elements to…

50 years ago today Alan Shepard became the first American into space, launching at just after 9AM from the Space Coast of Florida and finishing just over 15 minutes and 117 miles up later.  The…

50 years ago today, Alan Shepard journeyed into the Final Frontier and became the first American in space, following USSR cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin by a period of weeks. Here is a look at some of…

I am launching my Project Calliope picosatellite on an Interorbital Systems (IOS) rocket.  IOS invented the Tubesat format.  What if Interorbital fails-- their rockets all blow up, they run…

Gravity does funny things.   While the Earth looks rather round in pictures from space, the distortions that would have to occur in order to have uniform gravity everywhere would make it look…

Back before I became a ham-licensed PCB-ordering flux-soldering basement-building boutique satellite maker, it all started with an idea-- actually, with a column on my other ID here at Science 2.0.…