From Classroom to Orbit: How a High School Girls-In-STEM Club Started the Journey of Pleiades Orpheus

Students from Irvington High School in Fremont, California built and launched a 1U CubeSat satellite called Pleiades Orpheus after its establishment in 2022. This project was a central part of the Irvington High School Girls-in-STEM Club and is among the few high school student-run programs globally to design, build, and successfully launch a satellite. The Pleiades Orpheus team strived to increase gender diversity in their student body, eventually leading them to form IHS Women in Satellite Engineering (IHS WiSE) in 2024. This paper will showcase the central goals and progress of the team, highlighting their most important goal: to make engineering more accessible to students. By addressing women as a historically marginalized group in engineering fields, and by fostering this passion from a young age, the initiative hopes to make a direct impact on this issue. An account of mentorship from students from the Bronco Space program from California Polytechnic State University Pomona, the PolySat team from California Polytechnic State University (San Luis Obispo), and the Stanford Student Space Initiative from Stanford University is given. The discussion will emphasize how high schoolers navigated technical and logistical challenges enhancing their engineering, problem-solving, program management, and collaborative skills. Their 1U CubeSat, Pleiades Orpheus, was intended to detect light pollution across North America, applying scientific innovation to environmental research. The discussion will then entail the successful CubeSat launch, made on December 21, 2024. Finally, the paper will close with the broader implications and future plans for the Irvington High School Women in Satellite Engineering (IHS WiSE) initiative. The achievement represents a pioneering milestone in high school education, advancing the accessibility of CubeSat development for future generations of young women.