Aiglon’s Space Mission: A Project Update from the CubeSat Team

As the 2026 launch of Aiglon’s CubeSat comes closer, two members of the student-led team took time out of their busy schedules to share some updates on the process, and to provide insights into their work on this real-world STEM project.

Aiglon students are trailblazers in Europe to design, build, test and launch a school satellite. Sixteen students, aged 14 to 18, are at the heart of the CubeSat project, which began in January 2024. From ideation, to design, prototyping, project management and fundraising, this is a 100% student-led project. 

Evolution of CubeSats 

Much of the technology that makes modern day life easier and safer is the result of the satellites that orbit invisibly in the skies above us. Satellites are used for GPS navigation, weather forecasting, communication and astronomy. Traditional satellites are huge (the size of a car), cost hundreds of millions, and take years to design, build and launch.

The development of CubeSats was a game-changer. If you think of CubeSats as the smartphone revolution of satellites, this will give you a stronger appreciation of why the technology has accelerated innovation in dozens of industries – CubeSats are smaller, cheaper, and more accessible.

Similar in size to a Rubik’s cube, a compact 10cm x 10cm x 10cm (hence the moniker), CubeSats are miniature, standardised satellites, which are launched into space onboard rockets, and used for a wide range of purposes once deployed in orbit – from research and communication, to imaging and investigation.

An Update from Our CubeSat Team 

For a talented team of Year 11, 12, and 13 Aiglon students, CubeSat theory and technology are not confined to their computer screens or IB textbooks – nor are they just some tiny speck of light roving the night skies a thousand kilometres above our snowy Alpine peaks. For over eighteen months, thanks to the generous philanthropy of our parent community, and the outstanding teaching and support of our STEM departments, this student-led team has been working in the school’s state-of-the-art laboratories, researching, designing, and testing, with the final goal of constructing and, ultimately, launching their own CubeSat into orbit from a Space X Falcon rocket. The achievement puts the Aiglon team on an equipotential with a small group of global universities.

STEM-based projects tend to see an under-representation of women, but Aiglon’s CubeSat team is strikingly gender-balanced. For Jennifer (Year 13), whose area of expertise (developing the heating element of the CubeSat) is essential to the mission goal, it was easy to explain why she was eager to join the project: “Because we’re sending something into space!”

Once in orbit, Aiglon’s CubeSat aims to collect and communicate data about how the CubeSat heats up; this data will then be shared for other engineers to use, enabling them to better regulate how their own missions will work around the challenges of thermal control.

As she strives to ensure the CubeSat’s success – “There’s a multitude of things that can go wrong,” explains the originator of Aiglon’s CubeSat project, Kami (Year 12), “we have to be prepared and to envision multiple scenarios” – Jennifer’s work ranges from measuring temperatures and baking components to observe any mass loss, to, more recently, acquiring the skills of soldering and chemically etching circuit boards.

Meanwhile, the team’s head mathematician, Akbar, felt the significant responsibility of managing the power budget and electricity expenditure.

“For a good couple of months, Akbar spent hours and hours in front of a whiteboard calculating power drop and different theories: how much we’re allowed to pull; how much heat we can generate – it was really, really extensive. And that was before we even started ordering components and prototyping. These calculations took a while, but we were able to get something cohesive out of all of those workings,” recalls Kami, his appreciation of his teammate’s dedication strongly evidenced.

Success and Setbacks: Team Ethos for Learning 

Effective collaboration and a supportive ethos have been integral to creating a positive and constructive team environment. Like any real-world engineering project, the team have encountered challenges. Launching and recovering a high altitude balloon was a challenge in the Alps. The materials used in the vacuum of space have to be carefully selected to fit with NASA specifications.

As Jennifer recognises, mistakes are essential for learning, and both the CubeSat team and Aiglon’s teaching faculty cultivate this constructive attitude: “The team and teachers are so supportive; I feel like it’s okay to mess up sometimes, because you learn from the small mess ups, and get better at it, and then you get experience to build on for each successive prototype so you can make sure that the essential things go smoothly. And that’s only possible from the little setbacks or failures that you learn from.”

So what did the team learn from the high-altitude test?

“The balloon-test was brilliant for team-building,” Kami observes. “The gathering of important data brings everyone together.” In particular, the results from the test were invaluable for the team’s coders: “The coding has really evolved as a result of the balloon-test,” elaborates Jennifer. “The data compression that will now be used for our CubeSat to broadcast to Earth has been greatly improved and developed.”

Now, with every week that passes, the team gets closer and closer to the incomparable moment of watching their CubeSat being launched into space. A few weeks remain to complete the build at school, and then a core group of students head to Indiana (USA) in November for the project’s penultimate stage ahead of next year’s launch: laboratory testing with NearSpace Education, conducting stringent tests including vigorous vibration testing to simulate the conditions in the launch vehicle.

“NearSpace Education has been amazing,” Kami enthuses. “They have provided us with an engineering module which simulates the power source and communication present in the flight model. We will be testing our payload in an actual ‘cleanroom’ lab environment. They’ve been here every step of the way. There are really strict parameters for putting a CubeSat into space, and we’re not at the top of the chain either – we’re competing against large corporations, such as Boeing and Starlink.”

Kami is eager to see Aiglon being represented in the aerospace community: “In the future, we hope to get philanthropic funds for CubeSat projects; to see students writing papers and submitting these to conferences, so that we can network and spread our programme ideas, which will help us secure further funding. I have been conducting novel research in satellite radio communications in mountainous terrain. I am  presenting my research at the AIAA (American Institution of Aeronautics and Astronautics) conference in January, which is the largest aerospace event in the world - you can talk to all these big companies, such as Boeing, and spread your ideas. So if Aiglon students submit papers, it will give us more of a presence on that stage.”

The sky really is the limit for the scientists and engineers in Aiglon’s CubeSat project. And with a preliminary launch date scheduled for Spring 2026, the countdown has truly begun.