13th Cal Poly CubeSat Launches into Space
Top image: Students Adrian Serniak and Benjamin Kurtz perform side panel integration on the CubeSat satellite in a clean room on campus last July.
Just after 4 a.m. on March 30, Cal Poly’s SAL-E CubeSat mission launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
The satellite, the 13th Cal Poly CubeSat to be launched into space, is about the size of a shoebox. It contains two small payloads: Computer Architecture Research Project, or CARP, is a silicon computer chip designed by Cal Poly students using open-source silicon and custom firmware that will be monitored for how it responds to radiation and other environmental stressors in low Earth orbit; and the other is SQUAD, Space Quacker Advanced Development, that will test a long-range radio device in the harsh environment of space, collecting performance data while in orbit.
More than 30 people from Cal Poly and the CubeSat Lab watched the launch from Ocean Avenue near Vandenberg, including students, faculty and some family members. It was a foggy morning, and the sky lit up when the rocket ascended and the crowd went silent. All watched in awe for about a full minute while the roar of the launch washed over the group. Afterward came cheers, high fives and hugs.
Now that the spacecraft is in orbit, students from the CubeSat Lab are monitoring the satellite daily via the campus ground station.
The SAL-E CubeSat honors the late physicist and astronaut Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, as well as the first CubeSats built at Cal Poly — CP1 and CP2 — which launched in 2006 aboard a Russian rocket in Kazakhstan. Though a rocket malfunction destroyed those satellites, the CubeSat concept — jointly developed by two professors, one from Cal Poly and another from Stanford University, ushered in a new standard that changed the rules of who could reach space.
In 2025, CubeSat Lab manager and aerospace engineering senior Jess Bleakley told Cal Poly Magazine that "this satellite is all of us."
“It carries everything we’ve put into it — and now it’s going to space.”
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