NASA had 86,000 satellite designs to choose from and picked one built for about $1,500 by a teenager in rural India — at 64 grams it was the lightest satellite ever sent to space, and its whole job wa
In 2017, NASA launched a 64-gram satellite designed by 18-year-old Rifath Sharook as part of a student competition. The project, which cost approximately $1,500, was one of many experiments flown on a sounding rocket to test small-scale space technology.
Why it matters
This project highlights the democratization of space exploration and the potential for low-cost, student-led innovation to contribute to aerospace research.
Rifath Sharook's 64-gram, 3D-printed student experiment was one of more than 80 Cubes in Space payloads flown on a NASA sounding rocket in 2017.
The 64-gram student experiment that lifted off from NASA’s Wallops Island facility on June 22, 2017 would have been easy to lose in a coat pocket. It was a cube less than four centimeters on a side, weighing 64 grams, lighter than a smartphone, lighter than a hen’s egg, and it had been designed not in a cleanroom in Pasadena or Bangalore but in Pallapatti, a small town in the Karur district of Tamil Nadu, by an 18-year-old named Rifath Sharook.
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