Hyderabad students’ CubeSat Payload SBB-1 set for January 12 launch on ISRO’s PSLV-C62

In a rare achievement for school-level engineering, a group of students from Hyderabad has designed and built a flight-ready CubeSat payload that will be launched aboard the Indian Space Research Organisation’s (ISRO) PSLV-C62 mission later this month.

The payload, named Project SBB-1 (Satellite Blue Blocks-1), has been officially manifested by ISRO and will lift off on January 12 at 10.17 am from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre. The project was executed by 17 students aged 12 to 15 from Blue Blocks Montessori School, Hyderabad.

Unlike typical school STEM projects, the initiative went beyond kits or simulations. The students designed and assembled the payload hardware from scratch and developed firmware for real-time telemetry. They integrated and soldered commercial off-the-shelf sensors to study thermal behaviour in the vacuum of space.

Scientists from Take Me 2 Space provided technical guidance, while the students handled all execution independently. Organisers said adult intervention during the engineering process was intentionally minimised to encourage autonomous problem-solving.

“We didn’t want to just watch a launch; we wanted to be on the rocket,” said one student, recalling that debugging communication failures between sensors and firmware was among the most challenging tasks.

The project was carried out under an educational framework developed by the Blue Blocks Micro Research Institute, which follows a “Structural Autonomy” model aimed at building resilience and engineering competence by limiting continuous adult supervision.

Pavan Goyal, associated with the initiative, said the project proved that age was no barrier to advanced engineering. “They are not future engineers. They are flight-ready engineers today,” he said.

The effort has attracted international attention. The Nobel Peace Center in Oslo has invited Goyal to present the project’s methodology, while the student team has been selected to deliver a technical review of their CubeSat at the AMI Conference in Mexico.

At a technical press briefing held at the Media Plus Auditorium in Hyderabad, the students themselves addressed questions on orbit mechanics, firmware design and payload integration.

Blue Blocks Montessori School integrates advanced laboratories in space, drone and blockchain technologies into its adolescent curriculum.