Original Space Dawg achieving lift-off at NASA

As founding ringleader of the UGA Small Satellite Research Lab, Franklin alumnus Caleb Adams (BS ’18, MS ’20) displayed an early knack for tackling tech and software conundrums, as well as putting teams together.

Today, those skills, intuition and creativity are hard at work in helping lead efforts in Silicon Valley at NASA’s Ames Research Center to develop automated spacecraft to manage traffic in Earth’s low orbit and perhaps one day explore deep space:

Despite his boyhood interests, Adams didn’t enroll at UGA expecting to work on space exploration. Instead, he came on a music scholarship to play trombone in the Redcoat Marching Band.

But Adams quickly gravitated toward grappling with technical challenges—the more challenging, the better. He built websites for local businesses before jumping into hackathons (collaborative engineering projects that last 24 to 48 hours) at UGA and other colleges. After developing a remotely operated telescope at one of these events, Adams and his buddies’ next challenge was to send something to space.

He plastered posters all over campus asking, “Do you want to make a spacecraft?”

His efforts got a huge response. With the help of fellow students and faculty, Adams co-founded the Small Satellite Research Laboratory, an interdisciplinary effort to send a spacecraft about the size of a 12-pack of soda into space. The lab won competitive funding from NASA and the Air Force Research Lab, beating out other schools like MIT to get Phase II funding to launch their satellite. 

The students built the satellites themselves with oversight from UGA faculty. The experience no doubt readied Adams for his career today.

“It’s like a systems engineering course for spacecraft. It takes you through the whole life cycle of building and operating these things.”

After earning his bachelor’s in computer science, Adams stayed on to work in the lab and earn a master’s in computer science, both degrees from the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences. After years of work from dozens of students and faculty, UGA’s first small satellite launched in 2020 just after Adams started his first job at NASA. He met with other UGA small satellite lab alumni at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia to see the launch.

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More, including a nice video on the Space Dawgs in earlier reporting. A great story that keeps getting better. Go Caleb!

Image: NASA project manager Caleb Adams with a model of the STARLING Multi-CubeSat satellite inside the Multi-Mission Operations Center. Photography by: Andrew Davis Tucker & NASA/Ames Research Center