SpaceDucks: Cal Poly students prepare to launch devices into space

From May 31 to June 4, Cal Poly’s SpaceDucks team conducts its fourth round of launches, during which the team launches five to seven payloads on a weather balloon, testing its electronics. According to OWL Integrations CEO and co-founder Bryan Knouse, each launch is an attempt to refine the devices and get closer to preparing for a fully orbital device in space.

On launch day, the team will be on a 400-acre ranch near Cal Poly, which is the launch’s headquarters. Meanwhile, SpaceDucks members are hacking satellites.

The SpaceDucks team at Cal Poly partners with OWL Integrations to launch devices to high altitudes. OWL Integrations was originally formed to provide disaster relief following Hurricane Harvey, Hurricane Maria and Hurricane Irma in 2017.

OWL Integrations has developed a device called the “duckling” that can restore online communication to communities that lost it during the hurricane. According to Knouse, they created cluster networks and quickly deployed them in these regions to provide them with a basic level of communication.

Knouse said having devices on the ground creates problems such as being lost in a natural disaster or stolen.

“Even when we first went to India, they were telling us about how we really need to make sure your facilities are sealed tightly so they’re monkey-proof,” Knouse said. “And I thought she meant that monkeying was kind of a metaphor, people were having fun with them. They said, “There are no monkeys breaking into everything in this region, and you have to make sure they can handle it.”

Cal Poly alumna Sarah Storelli told OWL Integrations to check out Cal Poly at the same time aerospace engineering sophomore Evan Agarwal released a Styrofoam box on an atmospheric weather balloon to create a capsule in which the animal could survive. Agarwal placed a live mouse in an experiment that will be launched to an altitude of 30,000 feet in order to design a space capsule that would enable human flight.

“I saw this article and was fascinated by the idea,” Knouse said.

He said they contacted Agarwal because OWL was considering putting its technology – which they call “ducks” – in space to be able to operate above natural disasters.

That same year, Agarwal, Knouse and Agarwal’s friends in the aerospace industry conducted the first round of SpaceDucks.

Knouse said their partnership has grown into an entire startup company at OWL, consisting of 25 undergraduate students, graduate students and three associate professors. They conduct collaborative research sponsored by the U.S. Air Force and have secured $1 million to support SpaceDucks initiatives and research at Cal Poly.

Knouse said there couldn’t have been a better partnership that came about by accident.

“I love the relationship with Cal Poly. This is one of the most valuable personal and professional relationships of my life,” Knouse said. “(The) students are top notch. The professors have great knowledge and are very committed. We think this relationship will last for a very long time.”

Last year, teams lost three of the six payloads they fired. This year, their goal is to recover every device by implementing new tracking technologies.

They want to improve electronics, produce all-American-made electronics and test new types of radio communication techniques, Knouse said.

Senior Electrical Engineer Joseph Nuccio works with his partner on an automated test code to test capabilities, connection, connection strength, range, and to see if the radios are damaged or not working properly with the code.

Nuccio said this experience prepared him well to enter the electrical test engineering industry.

“Working throughout the last year on test code directly from the hardware and deploying it directly into SpaceDucks is a really good thing if I can put on my resume that I wrote test code that will fly to the vicinity of space,” Nuccio said.

Electrical engineering graduate Kevin Nottberg is the project’s electronics design and development manager. Nottberg is leading the development of QUAD, which stands for “Quacker Advanced Development.”

The name comes from the “Quaker board” he worked on for his senior capstone project in 2020. OWL sponsored this senior capstone

Nottberg said launching these devices with a weather balloon is cheaper than launching them from a CubeSat, a standard for launching objects into space developed by Cal Poly in 1999. The balloons are launched at altitudes of 100,000 to 30,000 meters. feet to expose these devices to a low temperature and vibration environment.

“That’s the goal of SpaceDucks,” Nottberg said. “We just put some cool electronics together, make sure it works in extreme conditions, and then the second goal is to increase the range.”

Senior Electrical Engineer Nicolas Alvarez is working with Senior Electrical Engineer Douglas Liu on their senior project to develop a version of the QUAD board, called QUAD RC-2, which they hope will be ready in time for launch on a weather balloon.

“It’s kind of a privilege to have your equipment this high up, and being able to test communications up there is really cool,” Alvarez said.

Liu is also involved in designing a camera system for one of the payloads to capture images of the bursting balloon and the surroundings near space.

Liu said they found OWL helpful in terms of the resources and information it shared with them, and said it was a great learning opportunity to “get their hands dirty” with real-world experiences.

“Being a part of the senior project is a truly eye-opening experience,” Liu said.

Nottberg said the great thing about OWL is that, as a small company, the things they create at Cal Poly are “extremely important” to OWL.

“The stakes and importance of this work are truly exciting,” Nottberg said. “The other thing is that with projects like SpaceDucks, we actually build and deploy electronics in real time and find out in real time whether it works.”