Reliability & failure statistics

Also known as Infant mortality, Dead on arrival, PocketQube census

Empirical survival rates, dead-on-arrival root causes (EPS, antenna release, unknown TLE) and lessons from the 2013–2025 PocketQube census.

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SQ-EN-006
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Lessons from CubeSat and PocketQube flight records

Historical surveys of university and commercial CubeSats by Swartwout[1] and Langer & Bouwmeester[2] showed that roughly of first-time university nanosatellites either failed to separate or were never heard from on orbit ("dead on arrival", DOA). In the census of PocketQubes[3], outcome statistics depend strongly on deployment route and pre-launch end-to-end testing[4].

PocketQubes launched in 2013–2025 by size (n = 77)
SizeUnitsShare
1P2532%
2P2330%
3P1722%
1.5P912%
2.5P23%
6P11%
Total77100%

nadir lab. PocketQube census (Appendix A): every PocketQube launched in 2013–2025, launch failures included; one row per spacecraft.

The four recurring failure chains

Across both CubeSat and PocketQube datasets, early mission losses cluster around four mechanisms rather than exotic radiation or structural failure[2]:

  1. Electrical power system (EPS) and inhibit deadlocks: Mechanical kill-switches that stick after months of compressed storage inside the deployer, or un-resettable latch-up protection that trips during initial capacitor inrush.
  2. Antenna deployment or RF chain failure: Burn-wire resistors sized without accounting for cold-case battery internal resistance in vacuum, or coaxial/U.FL jumpers that unseat during launch vibration[3].
  3. Bootloop on brown-out: Transmitting a high-power beacon before solar arrays recharge a storage-depleted cell collapses the bus voltage and traps the in an endless reboot cycle.
  4. Long-duration "Day-in-the-Life" (DITL) omission: Teams that run an uninterrupted end-to-end mission simulation—from deployment switch release through timer countdown, antenna burn and ground-station decoding—catch over of software and interface defects before delivery[5].

References

  1. [1]Swartwout, M. (2013). The first one hundred CubeSats: a statistical look. Journal of Small Satellites, 2, 213–233.
  2. [2]Langer, M., & Bouwmeester, J. (2016). Reliability of CubeSats — statistical data, developers’ beliefs and the way forward. In: 30th Annual AIAA/USU Conference on Small Satellites (SSC16-X-2).
  3. [3]nadir lab. (2026). PocketQube-class picosatellites: architecture, flight heritage, and a multi-method post-flight analysis of Grizu-263A [Preprint]. nadir lab. Research Monographs (SQ-R-001).Read on nadir lab.
  4. [4]Idriss, M. I., & Ismail, N. A. (2025). The rise of PocketQube: an in-depth look at mission trends and attitude determination and control systems technologies [Preprint]. TechRxiv.doi:10.36227/techrxiv.175393444.46626282/v1
  5. [5]European Cooperation for Space Standardization. (2022). ECSS-E-ST-10-03C Rev.1: Space engineering — Testing. ESA Requirements and Standards Section.ecss.nl(accessed 20 October 2026)

Cite this SatWiki entry

@misc{nadirlab2026reliability,
  author       = {{nadir lab.}},
  title        = {{Reliability \& failure statistics}},
  year         = {2026},
  month        = oct,
  howpublished = {nadir lab. SatWiki SQ-EN-006 (Rev. 1)},
  url          = {https://nadirlab.space/wiki/reliability-failure-statistics/}
}