SATELLITES
Smack-dab in the heart of Silicon Valley, rocket science is fueling the latest competition between two longtime rivals: Wilcox and Leland high schools. A team of science students at each site is vying to become the world's first to put its own satellite into orbit.
The schools are strikingly similar contestants, right down to their mottoes and mascots - both call themselves the "Home of the Chargers" and boast a lightning bolt emblazoned on a Trojan helmet as their mascot. Fittingly, the main difference in their approaches to this mission is the type of batteries they plan to use. For this match, it's Recharger vs. Nonrecharger, and the prize is a ride into polar orbit aboard a rocket launched from Baikonar, Ukraine, in May.
The Valley highs' space race can be blamed on something called a Cubesat, the 10- by 10-centimeter brainchild of Robert Twiggs, a consulting professor at Stanford's Space Systems Development Laboratory (www.stanford.edu/cubesat). Twiggs sought a teaching tool simpler than the standard three-year, 40-pound orbiter. The result was a picosatellite consisting of about $400 in ham-radio components housed in a milled-aluminum cube. Twenty-four grapefruit-sized Cubesats, each weighing a kilogram, fit into the payload of a decommissioned Russian intercontinental ballistic missile, cutting the per-satellite launch price to a fraction of its typical 50 grand.
On a sunny Thursday afternoon at Wilcox High, 10 students are fussing over a pico-class bird called GoLo (www.golotech.org) in Lisa Kinneman's electronics class. Kinneman, an electrical engineer turned teacher, was brought into the project by HP, Lockheed, and Trimple Navigation - all Cubesat converts.
But even with high-profile backers, there's been drama and despair. Wilcox's ambitious Cubesat uses rechargeable batteries, meaning a longer transmission life but lots of FCC paperwork. Last spring, Lockheed received notice from International Traffic in Arms, a regulatory agency, that Kinneman's class-made solar cells constitute proprietary government technology, which requires the creators to be US citizens. "Apparently, the problem is that three of the students on the project are not naturalized citizens," she says. But despite the headaches, Kinneman is sure that Wilcox won't chicken out on the launch deadline with Leland. "It's not a race," she insists. "Ultimately, it would be nice to go into space together."
Leland High agrees, kinda. "Well, it's not really a competition," explains 17-year-old satelliteer Gordon Ho. "But, uh, Leland will be the first." Speaking from his parents' living room between swim practice and dinner, Ho describes his Cubesat team's lunchtime meetings in a smelly chem-lab storeroom and their creation, a simple picosat with nonrechargeable batteries. "Anyway, the only real competition is whose works and whose doesn't," he says. "If the satellite doesn't work, it might as well not be in space."
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