Mission results for Sapphire, a student-built satellite

More than 35 student-built spacecraft were launched from 2000–2005, with nearly 50 more scheduled in the next 5 years. While increasingly popular, such projects require significant commitment from universities, their students and their sponsors; thus, it would be useful to assess the educational and technical merit of these programs. For this paper, we examine Sapphire, Stanford University's first student spacecraft. This mission is relevant because of its on-orbit success, its role in founding one of the few sustained student spacecraft programs, and because Sapphire team members launched similar programs at five other universities around the world. Sapphire performed first-flight demonstration of micromachined infrared detectors, carried public-use instruments for photography and communications and demonstrated autonomous operation technologies. We compare the Sapphire design with on-orbit performance, and provide recommendations for creating similar programs. In particular, the strengths and weaknesses of Sapphire-scale projects are compared against the new CubeSat specification.