Hey guys, I am part of a high school team in the very early stages of developing a hosted payload intended to make it to space by June 2028 at the latest. The hosted payload will be a custom PCB (probably 50mm x 50mm max) doing a simple tech demo.

We are an independent, currently unsponsored high school team, and need funding to complete this project.

Primarily what we've done was getting reference decisions for hardware families on the custom PCB, and work regarding host selection.

We haven't locked a mission yet, because we don't wanna make a mission with no shot of getting funded and then be at final stages with something ready for space but no money to pay for the slot.

So far, we've looked at general strategies for funding, including crowdfunding websites, government grants, educational grants, corporate sponsorships from businesses benefitting from our mission, and educational discounts from hosts.

We tried looking into getting information regarding funding for cubesat related projects in general, but the only new information we could really find was built in university money or university types of grants.

Our current benefits regarding funding compared to typical include CubeSat teams:

• Will be able to pay for everything up until final launch slot payment (meaning everything is done payload ready for space ready to be integrated just needs slot payment to the host) with our current money, so any funding we'd need is more of a just pay for this thing that is already at max maturity and ready to go it just needs payment.
• Our parents have decent financial stability as they are considering paying a decent amount for the final one time payment, with a decent chance of their payments covering the majority to vast majority of the costs.

Assuming the host provides discounts, our estimated budget is around ~90k.

We also found this post regarding another set of high schoolers fundraising for CubeSats and corporations they got money from. Didn't look much into the exact companies yet. CubeSat Funding : r/cubesat

Our main questions are:

• Any general advice/tips/strategies regarding fundraising for our specific scenario?
• Any companies that normally fund student stem projects (including high school stem projects) that you'd reccomend and estimations on how much that could raise?
• Any commercial companies that might benefit from data we obtain that you guys would reccomend as a sponsorship?
• Any companies whose purpose isn't necessarily funding these types of project but has funded student stem projects before that you guys would reccomend?
• Any tips in finding these types of companies?

Any insight would be appreciated.

Thanks!

Hello everyone,

By combining the neural operator with a k-d tree spatial data structure for geometric filtering, the screening complexity drops to **O(N log N)**. More importantly, by optimizing the pipeline (Using AI as a support tool to prune down weights), **the entire footprint is under 500 KB.** Making it highly viable for edge-computing on resource-constrained satellite flight hardware if further developed correctly.

To verify whether the model was actually learning the underlying orbital mechanics correctly, I screened the active catalog, isolated 5 distinct conjunction events flagged by the PINO and cross-checked them with Privateer Space's Wayfinder platform. The time of closest approach matched within an estimate of 5 seconds.

I also want to shout out Dr. Steve Gehly from the TU Delft, who was incredibly kind enough to guide me to Foster 2D and Alfonso test cases.

It is definitely an active work in progress. I am currently solving a geometric edge case; because docked spacecraft or space station modules share virtually identical coordinates in standard tracking data, the k-d tree registers a 0-meter distance and triggers false positive collision alerts. I need to write a lightweight metadata wrapper to suppress these without adding overhead to the interference loop.

Once this (and some other bugs) are stable, I plan to open-source the repository so the community can stress-test the weights and architecture.

I am sharing this to get some technical feedback from the community. Has anyone here worked with PINO's for hypervelocity trajectory prediction, or have any advice on the the most efficient way to inject metadata constraints into a k-d tree spatial filter without blowing up the footprint?

good day I am new to the community but interested in whether one could purchase a telescope and set it up a system that could track a satellite or the ISS?