TubeSat

Also known as TubeSat Personal Satellite Kit

Picosatellite kit sold by Interorbital Systems: a sixteen-sided prism of circuit boards, 8.94 cm across and 12.7 cm long, weighing 0.75 kg, meant to fly on the company’s own rocket.

Document
SQ-FF-004
Updated
20 Oct 2026
Reading time
2 min
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Definition#

The TubeSat is a satellite kit that the Californian company Interorbital Systems (IOS) designed for individuals and schools. Its structure is a sixteen-sided prism whose faces are printed circuit boards; it is 8.94 cm across and 12.7 cm long and weighs 0.75 kg, of which 0.25 kg is reserved for the customer’s payload[1].

Business model and status#

The kits were to be launched on the company’s NEPTUNE rocket into an orbit of about 310 km, from which they would decay within weeks. Public sources describe the NEPTUNE family as still in development and record no TubeSat in orbit[1]. The TubeSat is therefore interesting today less as a flight standard than as an early example of low-cost satellite kits sold together with the ride.

How it relates to other formats#

Unlike the CubeSat and PocketQube standards, the TubeSat defines no deployer interface: spacecraft and launcher come from the same company. The format belongs to a business model rather than to a standard, which ties every kit to the schedule of a single launcher.

References

  1. [1]Wikipedia. (2026). Interorbital Systems.en.wikipedia.org(accessed 20 October 2026)

Cite this SatWiki entry

@misc{nadirlab2026tubesat,
  author       = {{nadir lab.}},
  title        = {{TubeSat}},
  year         = {2026},
  month        = oct,
  howpublished = {nadir lab. SatWiki SQ-FF-004 (Rev. 3)},
  url          = {https://nadirlab.space/en/wiki/tubesat/}
}