SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Not much can surprise someone who partook in four shuttle missions and three space walks during a 36-year career with NASA. Let alone, for someone who has spent their life studying space and space travel, the proposal of a new satellite technology.

But when Stephen Robinson, director of UC Davis’ Center for Space Exploration Research and a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, heard Proteus Space’s pitch in the summer of 2024, he thought it sounded “impossible.”

“I’ve been in the space business for a long time, and I’ve never seen anybody do something like this before this quickly,” Robinson said of the project. He served as the principal investigator for the UC Davis branch of the project, which the Center for Space Exploration Research worked on.

The proposal: launch a satellite into space 13 months after getting approved.

In a June 23 LinkedIn post, Proteus said it had completed the satellite after roughly eight months of work and was preparing for the October launch. In the post, Proteus claimed it was the fastest launch-qualified satellite ever made.

While Robinson acknowledged the risks of any satellite failing in space, he was confident that the launch would be a success.

“It’s been really a great experience to come up with something that’s something that other people had not done before, and try to bring together our expertise, our combined expertise, into a single vision,” Robinson said. “It’s out of our hands now. So we’re all going to drive down to Vandenberg (Space Force Base) in October and watch this UC Davis product get launched into space.”

UCD payload uses new technology

While Proteus, a Los Angeles startup founded in 2021, built the entire satellite, UCD contributed one of the payloads — the parts of the satellite that collect data and send it back to Earth. Robinson likened a satellite to a delivery truck and a payload to the package inside or the purpose of the mission.

The payload Robinson and his team worked on, which has been completed and sent to Proteus, models the satellite’s power system and predicts its future state based on an analysis of numerous factors.

Robinson said this technology will be necessary for traveling deeper into space, since the large distances between the satellite and a grounded mission control center will not give humans enough time to respond to a crisis.

“There will be long time delays, and so the ability to assess the condition of the spacecraft and then say, ‘Well, if it was this condition yesterday, that condition today, let’s predict what the condition is going to be tomorrow,’ will be very important,” Robinson said. “The concept is nothing new. What’s new is that it’s actually happening on the spacecraft itself.”

Robinson said that the payload’s ability to compare its predictions to the eventual state of the power system will allow it to get smarter over time and improve the technology.

It’s ‘all about teamwork’

Adam Zufall, who oversees the UC Davis side of the project in Robinson’s lab, is not a typical graduate student.

Zufall, who earned his bachelor’s degree in aerospace, aeronautical and astronautical engineering in 2017, spent almost four years as an engineer at NASA before returning to his alma mater to pursue a PhD.

He said it was “immensely cool” that he got to work on a space launch in college and said the work experience was critical for developing the skills needed to work in the engineering field.

“The central concept in engineering is being frustrated by building something. I don’t think you’re really, truly an engineer until you tried to put something together to accomplish a task — going from theoretical thing to physical product,” Zufall said. “You just can’t get that when you’re completely in the classroom.”

Robinson, who said building spacecraft is “all about teamwork” due to its complexity, said he was very happy to have Zufall on his team and called him a “spectacular project manager.”

“One of the most complex and difficult and critical things about building spacecraft is the testing of it, because you can’t test it exactly like it’s going to be in space. He’s done this before,” Robinson said. “He brought this expertise to the team and it turns out he’s a natural, very talented team leader who can motivate his team to work at a very rapid pace without getting burned out.”

While Zufall said he had multiple advantages before entering the project, including his experience at NASA, he said the most important part of the process was having a team of experts around him that knew a lot about individual parts, allowing him to focus on the bigger picture.

“My first time sitting down at a conference table when I started working at NASA, I was looking around the table and I realized, ‘Oh, I could go to school for the rest of my life and never get the education that is cumulatively present at this table.’ You just can’t know everything,” Zufall said. “Learning how to work with experts and leverage the specialties of everyone on the project is a lot of fun and that’s why I like my job.”

‘Proud to be a part of this’

Proteus was founded to both decrease the amount of time it takes to send a satellite to space and individually tailor satellites to the payloads to hopefully improve their efficacy.

“Instead of trying to make a round peg fit into a square hole every single time you want to integrate a payload, why not design a new satellite for a new payload from scratch every time?” Proteus CEO David Kervin said in 2023, according to Payload Space.

Robinson said Proteus is able to build faster than other groups due to an artificial intelligence-based software that can take in important factors like cost, size and reliability and quickly give multiple options for how to assemble the satellite. Kervin told Space News in 2024 that the software could analyze 2,300 configurations in roughly 10 minutes.

“It’s kind of like building a house really. The bathroom can be over there and the garage can be over there, or maybe you want the garage over here, that makes the bathroom go over here,” Robinson said of the process. “It’s kind of like that, only extremely demanding.”

Robinson, also an adviser for Proteus, said once the project got its funding approved from the federal government, he was excited to work with the company due to its mix of technology and experienced employees.

“This particular approach, it reduces the lead time that it takes to build and fly the satellite, but it also reduces the risk because of this wise partitioning of expertise between AI databases and human experience,” Robinson said. “We are very excited and proud to be part of this new way of doing things for small satellites.”

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