Aug 20, 2026
UC Santa Cruz students put their first satellite in orbit
A ten-student team built a CubeSat that is now in orbit and transmitting, after eighteen months of work, vibration testing at NASA Johnson, and a launch on a resupply mission.
UC Santa Cruz's first student-built satellite is in orbit and talking to the ground.
SlugSat, the university's satellite engineering student organisation, deployed a CubeSat from the International Space Station on 2 July, three months after it launched aboard NASA's NG-24 resupply mission in April. It is now transmitting to SlugSat's own ground station, where the team is running health checks and pushing software updates.
The build took eighteen months. A ten-student team led by David Uniack, a robotics engineering graduate, worked out of Slugworks, the university's student creatorspace, using Cal Poly Pomona's open-source PROVES platform. The satellite passed vibration testing at NASA's Johnson Space Center in December 2025 and flew under NASA's CubeSat Launch Initiative.
For the county's hardware employers, the satellite is not really the story. The story is that a group of undergraduates a few miles up the hill designed, built, qualified and now operate flight hardware, clearing FCC, NOAA and NORAD requirements on the way. That is the talent pipeline aerospace and instrumentation companies here are hiring from.
Reported by Santa Cruz Works. Read the original: https://www.santacruzworks.org/news/first-ucsc-student-built-satellite-deployed-from-the-iss