On 1 October 2026, NIS PocketQube, a picosatellite developed by students of the Nazarbayev Intellectual School in Astana’s Nura district, was launched into space aboard a Falcon 9 rocket fr om SpaceX, the company founded by Elon Musk. The rocket lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, USA.

NIS PocketQube’s arrival in orbit marked the culmination of a longstanding educational and engineering project that brought together schoolchildren, teachers and space industry specialists from Kazakhstan and abroad.

The project enables students to participate directly in a space mission, learn about the preparation of a small satellite, observe its launch and, in the future, receive telemetry from orbit.

Work on the project began in 2019 with the idea of creating an educational environment wh ere students could not only study space technologies in theory but also work on an actual spacecraft. The active implementation phase began in 2020, when the school established the NIS Space laboratory and introduced a specialised course, “Electronics for Space Technology,” for students in Grades 7-10.

NIS PocketQube is an ultra-small satellite in the PocketQube format. It measures 5×5×5 centimetres and weighs 250 grams. Despite its small size, the spacecraft was equipped with onboard control, power supply and radio communications systems, as well as solar panels.

Over the course of the

project, 17 students from the school participated in the NIS PocketQube team, some of whom have since graduated from NIS.

They worked on 3D modelling of the satellite, performed calculations for equipment layout, worked with electronic circuit boards and SMD components, programmed microcontrollers, developed data processing algorithms in Python and helped prepare the spacecraft for ground testing.

Over several years, the team completed almost the entire development cycle for a small spacecraft, from initial drawings and prototypes to testing and preparing the flight model for launch. In December 2022, the spacecraft underwent ground-based thermal vacuum and mechanical testing at the National Space Centre.

Final preparation of the flight model, the necessary checks and integration of the satellite into UARX’s deployment container were carried out in cooperation with a Greek company and with support from the Embassy of the Republic of Kazakhstan in Greece.

Specialists from JSC National Company Kazakhstan Gharysh Sapary and Ghalam LLP also contributed to the project. The joint project was led by Oralbek Bidaybekov and Manar Dosova. Arman Syzdykov, Kanat Sakhanov and Kazbek Baktybekov contributed to the development of the educational programme and the project’s engineering work.

As part of the project, the partners donated a receiving station (RX station), the first of its kind in Kazakhstan, to the Nazarbayev Intellectual School. The station includes a receiver, an antenna and computer equipment and is intended for installation on the school grounds to receive telemetry via the SatNOGS network.

There are plans to use the data received from the satellite in students’ research projects in physics, astronomy, programming and engineering disciplines. A ground system will be installed to receive and process the information, enabling access to satellite data for schoolchildren across Kazakhstan.

Thus, the school’s NIS Space laboratory has become a platform for developing the skills of future design engineers, electronics and onboard software developers, and specialists in satellite communications, robotics and data analysis.