The NASA Smallsat Institute recently hosted a webinar describing the V-R3x cubesat mission. The video and PowerPoint slides are posted at https://www.nasa.gov/smallsat-institute/v-r3x-technology-demonstration-overview-and-lessons-learned

Of special interest: the mission consists of 3 cubesats using LoRa mesh networking for communications. And NASA planned on first flying the cubesats on a high altitude balloon (HAB), but due to scheduling issues, the HAB flight occurred after the cubesats were deployed in orbit.

It’s interesting to see similar a NASA HAB mission is to our flights. Note the Walmart Styrofoam cooler and zip ties. But their cooler has an official NASA sticker.

If you don’t have time to view the entire 1hr video, the HAB presentation starts at 45:36. After the balloon segment, there is a presentation on their hill-top LoRa experiments with range testing, also interesting and relevant.

This webinar is one of a monthly series. Details on future and past presentations can be found here:

https://www.nasa.gov/smallsat-institute/small-spacecraft-community-of-practice