Discovery is Grounded

Time for one of those good news/bad news posts.

The bad news is that Discovery PocketQube is not going on the RocketLab flight as planned.

The good news is that all of the images, books, videos, etc are still flying.

So what happened? In a nutshell, the paperwork which I thought was complete, actually wasn’t. The agency in charge of that license has a very difficult to understand website and the green light that I had was only for the creation of the account, and not the license I was seeking. It turns out there was apparently a small step missed and well, that ended that. I have started the paperwork again and we will fly in 2020 if all the parts are actually done. I am not going to commit to a flight until I have everything completed correctly this time – with it signed in triplicate and stored at various locations to preserve the data.

That said, all of your data is still flying. The information was tucked into a small corner of the AlbaPod deployer. The data will reach space as promised. While not what I had planned, I can at least say tha, in a small part, the data is there orbiting the Earth.

Additionally, all the images, books, videos, etc are still slated to be on Discovery when it launches next year. I think that is only fair. In the meantime, I am going to be getting busy creating new videos, content, and most of all satellites.

If you have any questions about what happened, drop me a line. I will be glad to discuss it. Thanks for supporting Mini-Cubes. You have been a blessing to the whole idea.

Image Courtesy of RocketLab.