On 1 October 2026 at 18:32 UTC, a SpaceX Falcon 9 lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, on the Transporter-18 rideshare mission. On board were five PocketQubes built by the Libre Space Foundation: SIDLOC PQ-03, PQ-04, PQ-05 and PQ-06, and NIS-PQ, the fifth satellite of the QUBIK series, built for a Nazarbayev Intellectual School in Astana, Kazakhstan.
The PocketQubes rode to orbit inside PICOBUS v2, LSF’s open-source PICOBUS PocketQube deployer, on board OSSIE-D, the orbital transfer vehicle of UARX Space. Falcon 9 released OSSIE-D about an hour after liftoff, and OSSIE-D began deploying its payloads on 2 October at 11:48 UTC. PICOBUS flew full: alongside LSF’s five, it carried three ERMINAZ-2 PocketQubes from AMSAT-DL.
All five LSF satellites are now in a sun-synchronous orbit at about 515 km and 97.4° inclination. With them, ten LSF satellites have reached orbit, following UPSat, QUBIK-3 and QUBIK-4, and the two PHASMA CubeSats.
SIDLOC PQ-03 to PQ-06
The four SIDLOC PocketQubes carry SIDLOC beacons transmitting on 401.500 MHz. SIDLOC is an open-standard, low-power spread-spectrum beacon that lets any spacecraft be identified and located by an open ground segment, right from the first hours after deployment. These are the first SIDLOC beacons in orbit since SIDLOC-01 flew as a hosted payload on the maiden flight of Ariane 6 in July 2024.
All four are transmitting. Their beacons sit outside the amateur bands, so SatNOGS stations able to receive them are especially welcome: the first SIDLOC PQ-03 signal on the SatNOGS network was confirmed on 7 October.
NIS-PQ (QUBIK-5): a satellite for a school in Kazakhstan
NIS-PQ was built for a Nazarbayev Intellectual School (NIS) in Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan. The Kazakhstan Space Agency approached LSF directly, having come across its work at international conferences, with a clear idea: start building national space capability from the classroom. LSF first sent the school an engineering model, a lab-only copy of the satellite, and trained pupils on it. It then built the flight satellite that is now in orbit. The pupils can now talk to a satellite of their own and see how a ground station receives its signal under different modulations.
NIS-PQ is built on the open-source QUBIK 1P PocketQube bus: 5 cm on a side, about the size of a Rubik’s cube, with the same structure, power, radio and flight software that LSF publishes openly. It downlinks telemetry on 435.240 MHz (FSK, 9600 baud, CCSDS framing).
SatNOGS stations confirmed its first signal on 4 October. By 12 October, more than 100 observations from 51 stations around the world had been confirmed.
Also on board: ERMINAZ-2
The other three PocketQubes in PICOBUS were AMSAT-DL’s ERMINAZ-2U, -2V and -2X. They are built on the open-source QUBIK bus, communications system and flight software, as part of the ERMINAZ programme, and sent their first signals on 5 October. Counting them, eight satellites on this launch are built on LSF’s designs.
Follow along
Every observation of the five satellites is public on the SatNOGS Network, and their entries are on SatNOGS DB:
Their NORAD IDs are provisional until official catalogue numbers are assigned. The SatNOGS DB links will stay the same. If you run a SatNOGS station, schedule a pass: every observation helps identify and track the satellites.
You can see where they are on the home page map and follow their state on the missions page.
LSF Vice President Eleftherios Kosmas told the story of NIS-PQ to the Athens-Macedonian News Agency; read the coverage on protothema.gr (in Greek).
Thank you to UARX Space and SpaceX for the ride, to AMSAT-DL for sharing PICOBUS with us, and to the whole SatNOGS community, whose stations around the world are listening to these satellites every day.
See you in space!