Inside Valparaiso’s Student Satellite Program | Dr. Dan White

Susan Wise: Hi, and welcome to the Stars Launch Pod, Space Technology and Research Sciences, brought to you by starsciences.org, where we connect, collaborate, and accelerate. I’m your host, Susan Wise. Joining us is Dan White, a professor at Valparaiso University in electrical and computer engineering. He’s the director of the Wireless Research and Electronic Discovery Lab, which supports student special projects.
Dan has also been part of the Amateur Radio on the International Space Station program and is a core contributor with the Libre Space Foundation, focusing on satellite ground stations and open source for space.
Dan White, welcome to our program. It’s nice to have you here.
Tell us a little more—what else do I need to know about you? And also, I always ask everybody first: What are you currently working on to help further the space industry?

Dan White: Well, my day job is being a professor of engineering, teaching engineering courses. Valpo is undergraduate-only, so we’re taking high schoolers and launching them into either careers or graduate school. One of the things I think is really important is doing large side projects—special projects.
Right now our project is Valpo’s first satellite. We call that Beacon-2. Our mascot is the Beacons, but this is BCON-2, even though it’s our first one—that’s a long story.
So I’m working to really see small satellites, like PocketQubes or satellites even smaller than CubeSats, shorten the time students need to go from starting a project and learning about this to ending up with something in space. For novice teams, the multi-year timelines that satellite projects have traditionally had make it really difficult for a team without experience to get that experience and see the start and finish—the decisions and the results of those decisions.

Susan Wise: Satellites—when you guys launch them, what is their purpose?

Dan White: We are really focusing on the satellite systems themselves—

Susan Wise: Okay.

Dan White: —platform as a service. Most of my students are interested in the radios or the structures or managing the mission, and then having that as a platform to host an experiment.
So we’re working with, say, the physics department, which has some particle detectors for experiments they want to fly in space. And we find that really interesting. We’re more in the middle—we’ll put those experiments into space because that’s the place where you can gather that information, do those experiments, and get the data back down to the ground so you can do the science you want with it.
So we’re very much engineers at heart.

Susan Wise: And they’re learning all aspects of making this whole thing happen from the ground up.

Dan White: Yes. It’s not one discipline—it’s all disciplines. We have temperature, batteries, electronics, radios, antennas, and they all talk to each other. And at the beginning of these projects I hear, “Professor White, I haven’t taken that class yet,” or similar excuses.
And it’s like, “On this project, we’re going to learn what we need, and you’re going to do it.” An electrical engineer is going to do mechanical things, and a mechanical engineer is going to do radio stuff, because that’s what we need to accomplish the mission.

Susan Wise: Tell me about one of your “aha” moments.

Dan White: You know, the biggest one was—well, it’s a ton of fun doing this space stuff, right?

Susan Wise: Mm-hmm.

Dan White: My background was audio and acoustics. I switched from mechanical to electrical engineering so I could have my fingers on the systems when I was running sound for a large church in Nebraska. And I decided I wasn’t a good enough French horn player to make that a full-time job, and doing music and engineering at the same time would’ve been awesome.
That was a long run that went through graduate school—semiconductors, radios, antennas—all things that really had nothing to do with satellites.
When I started at Valpo as a professor, doing chip design wasn’t working at the time. So, let me back up—the Libre Space Foundation had started a project to crowdsource ground stations to listen to satellites. There was some really cheap hardware you could get off Amazon that was pretty cool back in the day.
Now you could do what’s called software-defined radio, which means you can listen to different frequencies and decode data without changing your physical radios, like in the traditional—

Susan Wise: Wow.

Dan White: —say, ham radio sense. It’s all on the computer—you just reprogram it, but the hardware stays the same.
And their idea was to use that cheap hardware, point antennas at the sky, listen to satellites, and track them. It was an awesome project because we could literally take a ham radio and a coat hanger, go outside, and hear satellites.

Susan Wise: So that was your “aha” moment.

Dan White: That was—

Susan Wise: One of them.

Dan White: —almost there. It was like, okay, this is a cool project; it’s a great opportunity. I totally agreed—that’s why we’re doing it.
But it was like, why am I so unreasonably excited about this? I mean, I get excited about stuff, but this was next-level.
And then it really occurred to me why this was so exciting. It was because ever since I was single-digit years old, I wanted to work as an engineer, maybe work at NASA, and do cool stuff. And my career hadn’t gone anywhere near space.
But now, all of a sudden, we’re doing engineering, and it’s very much space stuff. And it was like, oh—apparently this is my childhood coming back with a vengeance.
So that was a big “aha”—why this is so exciting to me. Apparently I’d suppressed the desire to do space stuff.

Susan Wise: That dream was just— it was there. You just needed a little something to push you in that direction.

Dan White: Sure. It came back.

Susan Wise: It did. That’s very cool. I like that.
What has been your biggest challenge, and how did you overcome it?

Dan White: Boy—the biggest challenge for this and for me is developing student teams. As soon as you develop a student over a couple of years of work and projects, they leave.

Susan Wise: Well—

Dan White: It’s usually called graduation.

Susan Wise: That’s part of it.

Dan White: That’s the idea.
The challenge is continuing a project that lasts more than one student cohort. That’s a large challenge. It’s a challenge for any student team where there’s a lot of turnover.

Susan Wise: What happens when you have to get somebody up to speed to continue what you’re working on—or you start over, start something new?

Dan White: It’s a lot of work.

Susan Wise: Mm-hmm.

Dan White: If we can get student team members thinking about the pipeline also, then they can start training themselves or new members, knowing how that process works because they went through it.
We’ve found that doing things like high-altitude balloon flights are much faster and cost a lot less. So a new team member can participate in an event, and then at the next balloon launch they can have a bigger role. By launch three, they’re part of the planning team and bringing in new members.
So faster cycles get them up to speed and let them see that their actions matter. Then they can take more responsibility for a space mission project, which is much larger.

Susan Wise: It’s got to be pretty special for you to help guide these kids and give them the bug to be just as passionate as you are, and then watch them move on and do great things.

Dan White: Yeah, it sure is.

Susan Wise: Do you keep up with some of the kids?

Dan White: I do. The group in our current satellite project—the seniors who have now graduated—100% of them are actually working in the aerospace industry.

Susan Wise: So cool.

Dan White: It’s amazing.

Susan Wise: Yeah. What would be a piece of advice you’d like to share with our listeners?

Dan White: Go to the places where the people doing the cool stuff are. That’s the easiest way to network. People say “network, network, network”—I never understood what that meant. I’m an introvert. I’d rather do cool stuff than, I guess, talk to people about it.

Susan Wise: Unless they’re talking about the same cool stuff you’re doing. Come on—that’s got to be exciting.

Dan White: Susan, that’s exactly right.
So find someone doing something you think is cool and just ask them about it. If they have a passion for it, that’s exactly what they just gave a talk about at a conference or industry event.
Just be curious. And don’t worry about asking questions that make it obvious you don’t know what you’re talking about—because you don’t. And there’s so much more we can learn and do.
Working with other people doing cool stuff—partnerships—that’s really how the big stuff happens.

Susan Wise: Dan, do you have any thoughts on us going back to the Moon, maybe Mars, further? We’ve got Artemis II coming up. Any thoughts on that?

Dan White: These are long-running projects. They have lots of side efforts. People are often surprised when they ask about space stuff and I talk about practical issues.
For example, hardware being in space for long periods of time is a deep subject.
Sending things to the Moon is much easier. Sending something to Mars—it takes a few minutes at the speed of light just to communicate.

Susan Wise: Yeah.

Dan White: Our robots have to be able to make decisions themselves.
There are a ton of opportunities in the new space industry—not just for rocket people, not just for satellite and radio people, but for materials, experiments, and all these areas where we need to develop knowledge for long-duration missions.

Susan Wise: Sure—there’s tons of crossover. Food, water, how we’re going to sustain life—there’s a lot of crossover there.

Dan White: Yeah. Walk outside your house and stay in your backyard for three weeks without going inside, and you’ll quickly find out just how much we rely on—

Susan Wise: Yes—

Dan White: —that we take for granted.

Susan Wise: For sure.
All right—I understand teaching kids and inspiring them is a huge passion for you. But I always like to ask everyone: do you have another passion project, past or present, that you’d like to speak about?

Dan White: As part of doing satellite stuff—what got me started in this was the Libre Space Foundation’s project called SATNOGS: Satellite Networked Open Ground Stations.

Susan Wise: What exactly is that?

Dan White: It’s a network of people listening to satellites with their software-defined radios.

Susan Wise: Okay.

Dan White: And we’ve worked over the past—I think we’ve been going 11 years now—to make that as easy as we can.
The software you put on your Raspberry Pi—just follow the instructions. You don’t have to be a Raspberry Pi expert or a radio expert.
I want to keep lowering the barrier to participation so high schoolers and middle schoolers can do this at home.
Right now we’re up to 350-plus stations around the planet. A lot of these are amateur radio people or people who also have their own satellites.
I want to continue working so that the people with these ground stations—who listen to satellites—can also participate in new satellite missions and receive data that is truly useful to the mission.
So: community involvement in satellite projects. Not just listening for fun, but actually saying, “My antenna that I put up, and learned a lot about, received data that really helped the science project.”
And that’s exciting.

Susan Wise: That’s something great to be passionate about. I like that.
All right, Dan, thank you so much for sharing your story. I would love to hear from you again and find out how things are going. Anything new coming up that you want to talk about, please—I’d love to have you on the show again.

Dan White: Thank you, Susan.

Susan Wise: All right, thanks.
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