NEW DELHI, Jan 9: A group of 17 students, aged between 12 and 15, from Hyderabad, designed and built a flight-ready CubeSat payload that will be launched aboard an ISRO mission on January 12 from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre (SDSC-SHAR) in Sriharikota.
The students from Blue Blocks Montessori School have named their payload Project SBB-1 (Satellite Blue Blocks-1), and it has been officially cleared by ISRO for launch aboard its PSLV-C62 mission.
Unlike typical school-level STEM projects, these students have independently designed, assembled, and coded the CubeSat payload themselves. They worked with commercial off-the-shelf sensors, soldered the components, and wrote firmware to transmit real-time telemetry. While scientists from Take Me 2 Space provided guidance, the students carried out all the engineering tasks on their own.
“Debugging the code when the sensors failed to communicate was the toughest part. We didn’t want to just watch a launch; we wanted to be on the rocket,” said one of the students.
The project was developed under the Blue Blocks Micro Research Institute using a framework called “Structural Autonomy,” which encourages problem-solving with minimal adult supervision. Co-founder Pavan Goyal said, “They are not future engineers. They are flight-ready engineers today.”
The initiative by Blue Blocks has received international recognition. The Nobel Peace Center in Oslo has invited co-founder Pavan Goyal to present the methodology, and the students will also deliver a technical review at the AMI Conference in Mexico.
The PSLV-C62 mission will launch the EOS-N1 Earth observation satellite along with 15 co-passenger satellites from India and abroad. It will also demonstrate the Kestrel Initial Technology Demonstrator (KID), a small prototype re-entry vehicle developed by a Spanish startup.
PSLV is ISRO’s trusted workhorse rocket, having successfully completed 63 flights – including landmark missions such as Chandrayaan-1, Mars Orbiter Mission, Aditya-L1, and Astrosat – and holds the record for launching 104 satellites in a single mission in 2017.
(Manas Dasgupta)
