NepaliSat-1: carry engineering knowledge home

NepaliSat-1 was a one-unit CubeSat developed through BIRDS-3 at Kyushu Institute of Technology in Japan, in collaboration with the Nepal Academy of Science and Technology. JAXA records its deployment from the International Space Station’s Kibo module on 17 June 2019, alongside Sri Lanka’s Raavana-1 and Japan’s Uguisu. Their shared release did not make them one spacecraft: each retained its own identity within the international project.

The station acted as a deployment platform. Arrival as cargo, preparation for release and independent orbital flight were separate events. The photograph shows the BIRDS-3 deployment group, but does not label which small object is which. A useful image caption can identify the documented event without guessing positions. This distinction matters when several nearly identical small satellites are released together.

Abhas Maskey’s account describes returning to Nepal after his studies and establishing Antarikchya Pratisthan Nepal, or APN, to build local space capabilities. Subsequent work connected engineering training to school students and local projects. A spacecraft can therefore contribute twice: through what it does in orbit and through the people who learn to specify, assemble, test and operate it.

Those skills include recognizing a bad measurement, documenting a wiring change and reproducing a test. Imagine a new team receives a successful circuit board but no pin assignments, software version or calibration record. It owns hardware, yet cannot reliably repeat the earlier result. A useful handover includes the tested configuration, expected outputs, failure cases and enough instructions for another person to reproduce the work independently.

Show a skill that another person can repeat

For an invented training exercise, twelve students each decode a known test packet before and after a workshop. Four succeed initially and ten succeed afterward. That is six additional successful students, or a fifty-percentage-point increase in the success fraction. It is evidence about this task and group, not proof that every participant can now design an entire satellite.

A stronger assessment asks students to explain units, identify an intentionally corrupted field and repeat the procedure on a different packet. Keep the difficulty comparable and record who received extra help. Educational kits such as PaperSat and E-Cube can support this progression without being orbital missions themselves. The aim is a growing ability to solve new problems, not simply possession of a model satellite or attendance at a demonstration.