## 7 Conclusions  
The experience of full-cycle design, development and operation of a CubeSat at the Lulea University of Technology was briefly described in this paper. The following remarks summarize the experience and highlight the direction toward the evolution of CubeSat technology and its community. First, the development of a CubeSat project requires solving problems concurrently in several domains. Therefore, any educational team that intends to conduct a CubeSat project should possess multidisciplinary expertise including systems engineering, controls and navigation, space communications, propulsion, etc. The experience provided during the project will require that students and researchers from different areas of expertise collaborate, enhancing their specific domain as well as a better understanding of interactions between subsystems and their impact on the behavior of the entire system. A laboratory with equipment for developing the satellite is required, and strong collaborations with other research institutes and companies that provide in-kind funding or support can significantly enhance the chance of success in the project. Although CubeSat projects in the academia can involve students for their training and mostly take benefit from their task force, the need for technical staff who can guarantee the sustainability of the project should not be underestimated, which in turn requires proper planning in terms of personnel budgeting and time allocation. Second, although independency is desirable for having autonomy and simple team coordination in any CubeSat project, the trend is to collaborate more with other institutions. Consortiums have the potential to collect more funds, gather higher labor power and enrich the project with wider points of view than independent projects. Consequently, more ambitious missions can become feasible. Third, CubeSat developing teams often organize their work mostly through improvised procedures. More work should be done on improving design methodologies for CubeSat systems to come up with better planning, management, development and testing tools. Fourth, the pool of products available for CubeSat developers should evolve to more accessible solutions, which can be handled with less highly specialized skills and expertise. In general, those components that require special attention or set of skills for handling are prone to failure, thus potential sources of delay in the project. Generic and accessible COTS products would make CubeSat projects feasible to a wider group of researchers in the space community, and thus create more ideas for the future small space missions. Fifth, a fully autonomous international network of ground stations is necessary to facilitate the work of small CubeSat developers such as universities or other research centers. Such a network may require solving several technical challenges. Particularly, some progress should be made with respect to the automation of telemetry data storage, distributed scheduling, and unification of control software. To address such a need, the SDR technology shows promise in rapid development of (multiple) ground stations, rather than the current state of hardware-based systems. Finally, there is currently a lack of reusability of knowledge and systems in CubeSat projects. For instance, the software needs to be programmed almost from scratch for every mission. Reusability has been demonstrated to be effective for both sharing knowledge as well as increasing product quality [55; 56]. Additionally, standardization tends to reduce the variance on product quality between competitors [57]. Using modular subsystems is a promising approach along this direction. However, more efforts should be put toward the standardization of different aspects of CubeSat mission design, development and operation. Preparation of the initial draft: C.N.P. ; modifications and revisions: C.N.P. and M.R.E. The in-kind provision of QB50 Project and Open Cosmos Ltd. is acknowledged.