University of Texas at Austin

The Texas Spacecraft Laboratory (TSL), part of the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics at the University of Texas at Austin, is a student-run laboratory in the Cockrell School of Engineering where graduate and undergraduate students design, build, and operate small satellites. TSL gives students hands-on systems engineering experience across structural design, avionics, GPS navigation, communications, and mission operations.

TSL's flagship missions are the BEVO CubeSats, developed as part of the LONESTAR (Low Earth Orbiting Navigation Experiment for Spacecraft Testing Autonomous Rendezvous) program, a collaboration between UT Austin, Texas A&M University, and NASA Johnson Space Center. BEVO-1 (also called DRAGONSAT-1) and its successor BEVO-2, a 3U, 4.2 kg CubeSat, were designed to be deployed from the Texas A&M-built AggieSat nanosatellite and perform GPS-based rendezvous and proximity-operations experiments, cross-linking data between the two spacecraft after release from the International Space Station.

Over 50 graduate and undergraduate students contributed to BEVO-2's design, fabrication, and testing, and the program continues to serve as a pipeline for training students in real spacecraft development, with TSL contributing to additional missions such as FASTRAC and ARMADILLO.