[lb1lf]

...and the less is spoken of the time I had visited a CubeSat workshop at CalPoly carrying the actual flight prototype of my university's first effort in my carry-on - for compliance testing - the better.

I found out the interesting way when leaving the States that ic it goes into space, it comes with lots of ITAR red tape of which I and my university had been blissfully unaware.

Being escorted onto my flight (which had been held for an hour!) by a couple of State Department officials who simply told me to sit in the first available seat when we got aboard was kind of cool, though. Instant upgrade to business class, and the pax in the vicinity probably spent the flight wondering who the heck I was and what I had been up to...

[minetest2048]

This is one of the BS of space engineering. Apparently if you combine a Pi CM4 with a carrier board manufactured in China running open source Linux, and you say its for a cubesat going to space, it might fall under ITAR

This is why a lot of European space hardware sellers have ITAR-free as their selling point

[picture]

Cubesat Developer's Workshop? Which year was this, if you don't mind me asking?

The funny thing is that I did pretty much the same thing, I had our flight computer prototype in my hoodie pocket to fidget with (since I'm leading all the electronics for the project) but luckily we weren't travelling far and didn't get any invitations from the government folks.

[lb1lf]

2004, methinks.

Our first sat, NCUBE, never made it out of the launch canister once in space; the 2nd one was on a failed launch which probably made some Kazakh farmer's day very interesting - judging from the photos I saw, it seems it came down in a wheat field - but the third one deployed successfully, but at that time, alas, I had graduated.

[picture]

Ah I see! I was a wee baby back then haha

[Vecr]

Is that an ESD hazard? Do you have a special antistatic hoodie?

[picture]

It's not as big of an issue for us since we use nearly all consumer/industrial stuff with build in ESD protection. I was also using it as a way to stress test whether the board would develop problems from handling, temperature and humidity changes, shock and vibration, etc