These Latinx Students Helped Design A Satellite That Was Sent To Space

Alejandro Cordero, a professor of electronics and the CEO & Founder of Innova Space, which is reportedly the only company in Latin America that specializes in the design and development of PocketQube pico-satellites.

Innova Space was born from an educational project led by Cordero and his seventh-year students. Cordero had challenged his students of Technical High School, which is dubbed number five in the city of Mar del Plata, Argentina with designing a satellite in 2019. 

In the process, Innova Space received an offer from a startup accelerator. An investment of $100,000 allowed them to bring onboard 12 engineers (4 of them aerospace engineers), in addition to the staff of students. 

They then received a subsidy from the Ministry of Productive Development for ARS $14,500,000 to pay for the launch and preparation of the satellite.

The link with SpaceX was based on commercial relations, according to reports. “They agreed to give us the place and we paid for the space to ‘put the satellite’. It’s like paying a ticket,” Cordero revealed to local media El Planteo.

“What I value about them was how they faced the challenge. Making a satellite was like their job. You can do anything, you just have to put all you got. The most beautiful thing about this is that 99% of the students today are studying engineering. The other 1%? Psychology.

“The wonderful thing is that they did not see the restriction of the place where they live, which are peripheral neighborhoods without resources. It is important that they are not limited by where they come from, rather, that they see everything they can be,” he exclusively told El Planteo.