CUBICS is a Canadian Space Agency (CSA) initiative that provides professors in post-secondary institutions with an opportunity to engage their students in an end-to-end space mission adapted to their needs and their level of comfort, expertise and readiness. Selected teams have the unique opportunity to design, build, test, launch and operate their own miniature satellite called a CubeSat. This program is a follow-up to the highly successful Canadian CubeSat Project (CCP), another CSA initiative between 2018 and 2023, which has seen the launch of 15 such satellites built by universities across Canada. 

These programs almost exclusively rely on Amateur satellite spectrum for satellite command and control, payload data downlink, with many featuring Amateur radio experiments, such as digipeaters, digital and CW telemetry beacons. As well, a number of them feature open source hardware and software which is of interest to Amateur radio operators. As such, these programs have many synergies with AMSAT-CA. While AMSAT-CA is not officially involved with any of the CUBICS teams, or the evaluations of requests for Amateur spectrum use (under our MOU with the RAC that is their sole responsibility), we closely follow the program, and ready to engage with university teams to work towards our common goal of  promoting, developing, and supporting Amateur radio in space. 

The CUBICS program has just completed one of its most important milestones, the Critical Design Review (CDR).The purpose of CDR is to demonstrate that the  final detailed design will meet all applicable requirements; the final detailed design is feasible, and the project is ready to proceed with the manufacturing, assembly and integration (M&AIT) phase. We congratulate the teams for passing this important milestone, and look forward to following the teams to their much anticipated rideshare launches next summer.