Protoflight Qualification of the BizuPod 1U CubeSat Deployer

Abstract

This paper presents the protoflight qualification campaign performed on BizuPod, a Brazilian-developed 1U CubeSat deployer designed to support cost- and schedule-constrained missions under restrictive international procurement and export-control conditions. BizuPod was developed to deploy Jussara-K, a 1U university-built CubeSat developed by UFMA and scheduled to fly on the Spaceward mission aboard the Hanbit-Nano launch vehicle. In the absence of sufficient public flight-heritage data to directly define qualification margins for the target launcher, verification requirements were derived from a tailored protoflight philosophy guided by ECSS-E-ST-10-03C and NASA GEVS. The campaign included vacuum exposure down to approximately 10−5 mbar at UFSC’s LARS laboratory, vibration testing (random, sine, and quasi-static profiles) at SIATT facilities, and additional thermal evaluations performed at Bizu Space. The system maintained normal functional performance throughout vacuum exposure. Vibration results indicated no evidence of global structural softness, with the first structural mode measured above 250 Hz under the tested configuration, and post-test inspections and functional checks confirmed full operational integrity. The results support BizuPod as a reliable 1U deployer solution for emerging programs and cost-sensitive missions.