Space Lab

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Space Lab heading to SmallSat 2026 with one talk and three posters.

Students and faculty will present work on open-source software, hardware-in-the-loop CI for CubeSats, attitude determination, and the PROVES program at the Small Satellite Conference in Salt Lake City this August.

Four submissions including authors from the Texas State Space Lab have been accepted to the Small Satellite Conference (SmallSat 2026), the field’s leading annual gathering for small spacecraft research and engineering. The conference takes place August 23–26, 2026, in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Lab members will present one talk and three posters, several in collaboration with the Open Source Space Foundation. The accepted submissions are:

  1. Talk — Mapping the Open-Source Ecosystem for Small Satellite Development

    Evan Jellison (Texas State Space Lab); Michael Pham, Ines Khouider (Open Source Space Foundation); Nate Gay, Blagoy Rangelov (Texas State Space Lab)

  2. Poster — F Prime to Flight Faster: Hardware-in-the-Loop Continuous Integration for Accelerated CubeSat Development

    Nate Gay, Saidi Adams (Texas State Space Lab); Michael Pham (Open Source Space Foundation); Aaron Siemsen (Texas State Space Lab)

  3. Poster — Ground-Based Magnetic Attitude Determination for Low-Cost CubeSat Missions

    Johnny McCaskill, Evan Jellison, Blagoy Rangelov (Texas State Space Lab)

  4. Poster — Five Satellites, Five Months: How PROVES Delivered Rapid, Reliable, and Open Software

    Ines Khouider (Open Source Space Foundation); Nate Gay, Saidi Adams (Texas State Space Lab); Michael Starch (Open Source Space Foundation)

The work draws on several active threads in the lab — including the development pipeline behind PROVES-Maia, the lab’s contribution to the multi-university Pleiades Five Program, and ongoing research toward making small-satellite missions faster to develop, cheaper to fly, and more open to outside collaborators.