Alba Orbital launches small satellites from 3D-printed deployment devices

Alba Cluster 3 & 4, the recent Alba Orbital space mission, had a record-breaking 13 PocketQube satellites launched from SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket.

The nanosatellites had been integrated in five AlbaPod v2, the PocketQube small satellite deployers by Alba Orbital that were 3D printed by CRP Technology in Windform XT 2.0 carbon fiber-filled composite material. The pods were launched into orbit in January 2022 as part of SpaceX’s Transporter-3, the third dedicated launch for SpaceX’s small satellite rideshare service, which aims to give microsatellites and CubeSats a more affordable ride into orbit.

Once separated from Falcon 9, the deployers started launching the PocketQubes into orbit. A total of 105 small satellites were delivered into a roughly 326-mile-high (525km) polar sun-synchronous orbit.

The 13 PocketQube spacecraft represented Alba Orbital’s biggest cluster to date, and the first PocketQubes deployment from Transporter-3.

Engineer Franco Cevolini, CEO and CTO at CRP Technology, says, “Congrats to Alba Orbital and to all the teams flown with them, for all their hard work. The successful mission demonstrates once again the extreme value of Windform for highly performance, heavy duty, and mission-critical applications.”

Alba Orbital’s Alba Cluster 3 & 4 mission with 3D printed deployers is not just a one-time prototype process, but routine work for CRP Technology and the US-based partner CRP USA using the TuPOD system.

Four of the 13 PocketQubes that participated in the mission marked a first:

• UNICORN-2A, 2D, & 2E are Alba Orbital’s first Earth observation satellites designed to provide the highest resolution dataset of the earth at night
• PION-BR1 is the first satellite developed by a Brazilian start-up
• GRIZU-263a is Turkey's first pico-satellite to be launched in-orbit, it was designed and built by Turkish student team Grizu-263 Uzay Takimi
• TARTAN-ARTIBEUS -1 is the first intermittent, orbital edge computing nanosatellite aboard the SpaceX Falcon-9 Transporter-3 mission that operates with no batteries. This open-source project was developed at Carnegie Mellon University

The other PocketQubes integrated in Alba’s 3D printed deployers were:

• MDQube-SAT1, an Argentinian PocketQube developed by classroom-turned-space-start-up Innova Space, carrying out an IoT mission
• UNICORN-1, another Alba built PocketQube, designed in partnership with the European Space Agency (ESA)
• HADES' & 'EASAT, twin PocketQubes developed in Spain by AMSAT-EA and Hydra Space designed for satellite communications between radio amateurs via a 145/435MHz transponder
• SATTLA-2A & 2B, an open-source project developed by Ariel University in Israel that use WiFi cards for extreme long-range link applicable to transmit video over 600km in line of sight (LOS) conditions
• DELFI-PQ, a triple PocketQube developed in the Netherlands by TU Delft | Aerospace Engineering, this satellite is a tech demo mission testing a Low frequency analyzer and recorder (LOFAR) payload and a laser retro reflector