Ask HN: Are there any toolkits, ref arch, designs, for DIY low orbit sats?
How do I get started?
You might check out https://libre.space
I believe there have been some small sat projects documented in Make magazine also.
Great!
Wow, hardware already made it to low-orbit, https://upsat.gr/?p=418 (2017-04-20)
> At April 18th 11:11 EDT at Cape Canaveral in Florida, an Atlas-V rocket launched a Cygnus cargo spacecraft to dock to the Internation Space Station with supplies and scientific experiments. Among its cargo UPSat, the first open source hardware and software satellite bound to be released in orbit by the NanoRacks deployment system on-board ISS in the coming weeks.
Yes. All the parts you need to build cubesats are available commercially, and as long as you follow the cubesat spec then there are multiple launch vendors to choose from.