By Leticia Barr

It’s up! North Woodside’s own SilverSat CubeSat launched into space Sunday, September 14, from Cape Canaveral, Florida, aboard a SpaceX rocket to begin its mission to tweet pictures to order from space.

Persistence paid off for SilverSat’s team of student engineers, who started out as a small group of local middle and high schoolers in 2017.

But the effort started three years earlier as a labor of love launched by North Woodside resident Dave Copeland, himself an aerospace engineer, along with his wife Cheryl Guerin Copeland, fellow North Woodside residents Leticia Barr and Jim Barr, and Woodside Forest neighbors Noelle Kurtin and Chris Rutledge. Their plan: Gather a group of middle and high school students to build and launch a miniature satellite known as a CubeSat.

It took a lot longer to pull off than they ever dreamed. “I thought it would launch by 2019,” Dave said. Their own children aged out of the project and graduated from high school, as have numerous students in the project. But others signed up to replace those who moved on, and successive teams plowed through the pandemic and other hardships to bring the project to reality.

The students packed the 10-cubic cm (about 4-cubic inch) satellite with a camera, radio transmitter and receiver, computer, solar panels, electronics, antenna, guidance systems, and other equipment needed for its mission to tweet from orbit.

Guided by Dave and a few other dedicated parents with the needed expertise, they tested and retested the satellite to make sure it worked and could withstand the rigors of space. They learned how to operate a radio transmitter, earned amateur radio licenses, and demonstrated their expertise to NASA’s strict standards.

“The goal of SilverSat has always been to provide area kids with an opportunity to learn something outside what they learn inside a classroom,” said Leticia, a former Montgomery County Public Schools teacher. Some of the students have chosen to pursue science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) degrees and careers, and more than a few have come back to act as mentors to the team. Leticia’s daughter, Emily, was one of the founding participants. Now majoring in engineering as a senior at Harvey Mudd College in California, Emily watched the livestream of the launch from her dorm room and texted a photo of the rocket launch to the family group chat.

“The project was accepted into NASA’s CubeSat Launch Initiative in 2021,” said Dave.

Anyone can visit SilverSat’s websiteat Silversat.org/operations to request a photo. If it’s feasible, when the little satellite is orbiting over the right spot in the Northern Hemisphere, it can take a picture of that spot and then send it out over X (formerly Twitter) from its account @silversatorg for anyone to see.

SilverSat is on Bluesky bsky.app/profile/silversat.bsky.social, Facebook @SilverSat and Instagram @Silversat.