A group of high school students at Oakwood School is doing something that most college programs never attempt: building real spacecraft.
The school’s space program recently received a $1,000 grant from the Aerospace Mechanisms Symposium, an industry group hosted by NASA and Lockheed Martin, to support two CubeSat missions: NyanSat, a technology demonstration satellite, and OUTPOST, a concept for a miniature space telescope capable of observing deep space objects.
The grant was presented by Matt Long, a Lockheed Martin Fellow specializing in spacecraft guidance and controls.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Long said of Oakwood’s space program. “I’ve seen undergraduates and graduate students working on CubeSats, but you don’t see high school students participating in something like this. It’s very unique and very special.”
NyanSat is a 2U CubeSat, which means it is composed of two cubic units measuring 10 cm to a side. NyanSat carries a suite of technology demonstration payloads developed in collaboration with NASA. The program operates under a cooperative research and development agreement, which includes a rideshare launch valued at about $300,000.
The flagship payload is an acoustic sensing system that measures structural changes in the spacecraft by tapping on it and analyzing the resulting sound waves, a technique that could have applications in future NASA missions.
The program’s teacher and founder, Michael Lyle, said NyanSat is on track to be flight-ready by the end of 2026, with launch expected sometime in 2027 pending the availability of a suitable rideshare launch.
The most likely deployment scenario places the satellite in low Earth orbit at roughly the same altitude and inclination as the International Space Station.
“There’s a lot of traffic going to the ISS,” Lyle said. “A lot of cargo ships you can fly along with.”
While NyanSat approaches the launch line, a second team of students has begun work on OUTPOST, a 3U CubeSat space telescope roughly the size of a shoebox. If realized, OUTPOST would photograph deep space objects including comets, exoplanets, variable stars and quasars, and downlink the data to a ground station at Oakwood.
The mission’s primary engineering challenge centers around a deployable central boom roughly 1.5 meters long that, once extended, must hold its position to within a few microns, or about one-tenth the thickness of a human hair.
“Something that can both pack down into a small volume and be very, very stiff when extended,” Lyle said. “That’s the core problem OUTPOST has to solve.”
The AMS grant will go toward that deployment mechanism research. If successful, Lyle said, OUTPOST could serve as a low-cost framework for future telescope constellations—multiple small instruments covering large portions of the sky at a fraction of the cost of conventional observatories.
The total budget for OUTPOST is estimated at around $200,000, and the team is currently seeking funding.
The space program, now in its fifth year, grew out of a robotics program that Lyle said he gradually found too limiting. He built a lab capable of meeting NASA fabrication standards and began recruiting students willing to take on problems that didn’t have easy answers.
Ryan Beaulieu, a senior serving as NyanSat’s software systems lead, said the program has demanded a different kind of learning than traditional coursework.
“I came into the team as the only person who knew Python,” Beaulieu said. “Over the past year and a half I’ve had to teach others how to work independently so we can function as a real team. That’s probably the most valuable lesson.”
Anaïs Cannieux, a sophomore serving as project management lead, said she had never considered actually building something destined for space before enrolling in the class.
“I saw that this program was offered and thought, why not try it?” she said. “I’m really glad I did.”
Kevin Joel Gardner, a sophomore leading the OUTPOST team, said the experience of modeling the satellite and testing calculations has been its own kind of reward.
“The gratification you get when you run numbers through calculations and they work, and the frustration when they don’t—it’s been a real opportunity for us to put our thoughts and ideas into something, and see those ideas be something that could become a reality soon,” Gardner said.
Mason Nishimura, also a sophomore, has focused on the pointing control system that OUTPOST will require.
“The precision we need is on the order of arc seconds,” Nishimura said. “Being able to actually do something real with math and engineering in high school is just insane to me.”
Long said the program reflects a need across the aerospace industry for a new generation of engineers, and that the AMS grant is part of a broader effort to develop that pipeline.
“They want to foster the development of younger generations and get people excited about the kinds of work we do,” Long said. “This team has shown they have extraordinary capabilities, and not just for high school students. At the academic conferences they’ve attended, these students stand out.”
Lyle said the recognition from the industry means as much as the funding.
“This stuff is hard to do,” he said. “The support means everything.”
Calvin Nuttall is a Morgan Hill-based freelance writer.
