SpaceBox STEP-1: THAI CubeSat toward a self-sustainable future

摘要

Thailand, especially for the past decade, has been encountering several political and economic challenges forcing the country to primarily direct its strength to countermeasure these immediate issues and to overlook the development of its intellectual capital, for example, a capability to economically compete with other nations in the Space industry or experts/ technicians in pertinent areas. Even though the nation has utilised Space in servicing the demands of its people for half a century, the country's attempts to transform itself from the consumer to the Space technology developer, so far, has yet to be materialised in a large scale because both governmental and private sectors still focus solely on using the space applications and on simple space science activities. Starting from an independent group of few Space enthusiasts, SpaceBox Laboratory was founded in 2015 with a BHAG to create the STEP-1 (Self-Sustainable Technology and Engineering Project - 1), a CubeSat which shall be designed, built and operated by THAI. Together with other similar attempts concurrently initiated by a couple of academic work groups, the project is aimed to help building the nation's sustainable capabilities for Space technology and to instigate the impactful movements in the Space research and education. From a small team to a large scale cooperation with a private communication company, academic institution and governmental agency, the project, although in its beginning phase, has already created an unexpectedly wider scale of involvement through several forms of collaborations, for example, fundings, public awareness creation, knowledge transfers, and technical skill developments. Furthermore the team continuously seeks collaborations internationally with the experienced players in the area to pave the ways or open unprecedented doors-of-opportunities for the team or other THAI wishing to follow our footsteps. Moreover, with its adaptive and flexible characters, SpaceBox team operates on such a foundation that can quickly respond to an innovative business proposition possibly emerging either domestically or internationally. Similar to other new comers in this industry, SpaceBox Laboratory has been facing several existing and unpredictable barriers in forming and running this project. For example, the challenge in finding an affordable access to orbit especially for the Non-US nano/micro satellite program or the lack of experiences and knowledges in certain areas such as the CubeSat testing methods. Nevertheless, the team has planned and prepared to face number of challenges throughout this project and the STEP-1 is planned for a launch in 2017-2018. Eventually the team hopefully, from the successes from this project, could help establishing a new, solid platform of cooperations among various sectors in the society to accomplish similar projects which would require big fundings, high level of involvements and large scale collaborations and SpaceBox team believes such foundation would help strengthening our nation's intellectual capital and creating a self-sustaining path to THAI future.