History – AAU Satlab

Since 2001, students at AAU, have designed, build, launched and operated five cubesats.

Our adventure came to life around 2000 when students had been watching how Ørsted – the first Danish satellite, got brought to life and launched before their eyes.

Inspired by Bob Twiggs USA, who invented the CubeSat standard – our students just required support from the Dep of Electronic Systems, starting the CubeSat adventure in late 2000.

Our first CubeSat – AAU CUBESAT – was built in less than two years and was on the very first CubeSat launch in 2003. Since then we have launched AAUSAT-II, AAUSAT3, AAUSAT4 and AAUSAT5. In addition we have had a number of payloads on other satellites, a number of parabolic flights and stratospheric balloon experiments!

In addition to all the good hours and fun, we have seen GomSpace, Space Inventor and Satlab A/S been raised in our labs before they moved out of AAU, but all still within 1,2 and 7km of AAU. Combined they employ more than 300 people and deliver missions, satellites and subsystems to all continents.

As an organization, we are proud to see the high quality of engineers in the companies and have been passionately following their journey from LEO to GEO and now even reaching deep space!