We asked our SUTS Mechanics Team Lead for updates regarding what they have been doing in the past few months.
The following is a short interview that we conducted.
My name is Igor Kuzmin — I’m the Mechanical Team Lead.
Over the past year, I’ve been working on the design of an engineering model of our satellite. Regarding recent milestones:
The overall satellite design is about 90% complete. This means that no major changes are expected in the future — only minor details remain to be refined. In general, this marks the end of the more “creative” phase of our work.
This allowed us to move on to creating technical drawings and prototyping.
As for the drawings (which, I hope, are more or less clear), I won’t go into the difficulties of this “standard” work — it’s not particularly creative, though some may enjoy it more.
About prototyping, however, there’s much more to say. It’s the process where we, as engineers, test our CAD designs. Yes, we use inexpensive materials that don’t meet space requirements (in our case, 3D printing, due to its accessibility and convenience). But this allows us to truly see and touch what we’re building. There’s a huge difference between what we see on our large screens and what we get in real life. We do this for one simple reason — to understand whether we can actually build our satellite. Because in the digital world, everything may look neat and easy to assemble, but in reality, things are far from perfect. Failing to test your design at least once can lead — to put it mildly — to problems.
We’ll share more detailed results in the near future.
Some concept art of SUTS
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