University-Class Spacecraft by the Numbers: Success, Failure, Debris. (But Mostly Success.)

University-class satellites -that is, spacecraft built by university students for the express purpose of student training -have been flown since the early '70s. In the last 10 years, however, the trickle of university-class missions became a flood, enabled by (and enabling) the CubeSat class of secondary payloads. Whereas it took 40 years to launch the first 40 university-class spacecraft, now it is not unusual for 40 university-class missions to fly every year. So what? Other than that clever bit of numerology, why does this matter? We believe that there are three important questions to address: 1) Do these missions matter? Given the 40% failure rate of university missions, do student-built spacecraft succeed often enough to warrant the launch slots they are given? 2) From a greater perspective, are university-class missions worth the investment? Are such programs more effective at meeting certain types of missions than their professional counterparts? Are their educational outcomes consistent with the investment? 3) What are the risks/costs of university-class missions? Specifically, are we accelerating an orbital-debris catastrophe by cluttering Earth orbit with student satellites? The participants of this conference can provide essential insight to all of those questions. What we bring to the conversation is data: the number of missions, their classifications, rates of mission success and relative risk of fragmentation and collision. This data has been compiled over many years through a combination of launch logs, publications, presentations, press releases and personal communication. In this paper, we will review the recent history of university-class missions, place them in the context of previous years, and address the questions raised above. In particular, we will show that the seemingly-high failure rate is consistent with the types of missions attempted and the experience of the participants. We will show that there are several types of missions that universities are best-suited to attempt, and that the orbital-debris risk posed by university-class missions (and CubeSats) is overblown. INTRODUCTION We have been documenting the history of universityclass space missions for a dozen years. The result of those studies can be broadly summarized as follows: 1) There sure are a lot of student-built satellites, and there will be even more next year. 2) University-class missions have had three watershed years: 1981 The second university-class mission flew (UoSAT-1), starting a steady stream of university-class missions; 2000 A string of on-orbit failures nearly ended student satellite missions in the United States (and directly led to the introduction of the CubeSat standard); 2012 The CubeSat standard was fully embraced by industry professionals, greatly reducing barriers to entry for universities and broadening the numbers and types of participants. 3) While almost all modern university-class missions are CubeSats, not all CubeSats are university-class missions. 4) The student launchspace is dominated by three groups: a. Flagship universities, whose satellites are the most reliable and have the most significant missions. These flagships fly a new spacecraft every few years;