New LunchSat team for 2010-2011

With the new influx of graduates on the Graduate Development Programme in October 2010, the 2010-2011 LunchSat team has been selected and has had the first meeting of the year on 11th October 2010. The video conference session involved the whole team being able to meet the new starters, followed by laboratory and ground station visits. There are also changes to the organisation to streamline the previous 14 sub-systems down into 6 key areas: Project Management, OBC, Communications, Payload, Platform, and Operations. This is expected to help to reduce the time spent in meetings and to enable the project to cope better with team members being unavailable at certain times due to illness or other work commitments. By having more people associated with each old sub-system, the workload can be better spread around each key area depending on priority. The main objectives this year is to aim for the cubesat platform to be ready for final flight testing by the start of 2012, significant payload development and a radio transmission between the Stevenage and Portsmouth ground stations via satellite.

Preparation begins for systems and management reviews

As the team works to finish subsystem reports and testing, the dates for the key events concluding the Lunchsat programme for this year have been finalised.

Senior and line management have been invited to attend the events, which aim to gather the Lunchsat team, management and interested internal parties for a briefing on the progress made over the past twelve months.

The details of the final sessions scheduled for this year are as follows:

Afternoon Session: Thursday 8 July

Another of the standard afternoon work sessions to conclude work in preparation for the upcoming reviews. Work shall begin on the presentations required for the reviews.

Subsystem Reviews: Monday 19 to Tuesday 27 July

Separate technical review sessions allowing Astrium experts to meet with their respective subsystem team members, for the review of documents and results attained over the year.

Afternoon Session: Thursday 22 July

The final afternoon session of the year, scheduled for preparation of the Systems Review.

Systems Review: Wednesday 28 July

A videoconference between Portsmouth and Stevenage will allow the Lunchsat team to connect for a round-table review with Astrium systems experts. The experts will share their opinions and advice for the team following presentations from subsystem team members.

Management Review: Friday 27 August

The annual End-of-Year Management Review, concluding the Lunchsat graduate training programme in the Stevenage Viewing Gallery. In a slightly different approach to the session, project lead Nick Fishwick is set to deliver the presentation to management, summarising the benefits of the programme and the progress made over the past year and looking for inputs from team members to describe their experiences. Astrium senior management, including Chief Technical Officer Pat Wood, are set to attend. A team lunch will be organised to conclude the programme and celebrate the achievements of the team.

The End-of-Year Management Review signals the conclusion of Lunchsat progress for 2009-10. Stay tuned as preparation begins for the upcoming 2010-11 session!

Project lead reflects on 2009 progress

Lunchsat project lead Nick Fishwick has today issued a statement to his team, reflecting progress made in the project throughout 2009.


In an email to all 43 members of the Lunchsat team, Nick gave his congratulations and 'thanks for all the hard work over the last few months'.

"The project is coming along well with real results, such as Systems producing an updated release of the Payload Interface Document which will be critical for getting new payloads and all subsystems have made good advances. On the hardware side, we have power tests ready to go and work planned on both groundstations.


"Due to the feedback from last year, we are communicating better with experts inside and outside the company (such as the Bepi Project Manager, AMSAT, Queen Mary Uni) and the blog is going and we are being tweeted about by Clyde Space [a large Cubesat company in Scotland].


"There have been some setbacks but that is normal for any programme no matter the size and so we should take this as an opportunity to show that we can overcome and solve such problems. We have a plan in place to solve the OBC power-up issue and this will be the highest priority in the New Year."


Visit the Lunchsat website news archives for more Project Management team communications.

Latest from the Project Management focus team

The Lunchsat Project Management focus team recently issued its latest actions to scope upcoming work packages for the subsystems and classify activities from current progress to the 2012 launch.

Subsystem leads are to supervise the extension of subsystem work package descriptions for completion by February; descriptions for each are to be released on our website pages to assist in the definition of each subsystem.

Those involved are Nick Fishwick (Project Management and Power), Stephen Pulker (On-Board Computer and Imager), Natasha Pushkin (Thermal and ADCS), Alex Buick (Operations and Payload), Jason Stones (Media and Communications), Fatou Mbaye (Systems and Mechanical) and Nicolas Sarda (Groundstations).

The focus team also arrived at a complete schedule that defines Lunchsat activity from present to the future launch. Three work packages are to be defined per subsystem for assignment to each of the three Lunchsat phases that have since been defined (1-3); these are detailed in turn (A-E):

Phase 1: Design and Analysis, October 2009 to September 2010
Phase 2: Testing and Pre-Launch, October 2010 to December 2011
Phase 3: Launch and Operations, 2012

Phase A: Detailed Definition, Manufacturing and Testing (GDP Year 1), October 2009 to August 2010
Phase B: Detailed Definition, Manufacturing and Testing (GDP Year 2), October 2010 to June 2011
Phase C: System Level Integration and Testing, July to December 2011
Phase D: Pre-Launch Activities and Launch, January to June 2012
Phase E: In-Orbit Commissioning and Operations, July to December 2012

The Lunchsat website now features details of our complete schedule.