UPAEP AztechSat

UPAEP AztechSat is the satellite engineering program of the Universidad Popular Autónoma del Estado de Puebla (UPAEP), a private university in Puebla, Mexico. An interdisciplinary student and faculty team designed, built and operated AztechSat-1, a 1U CubeSat and Mexico's first domestically built satellite developed through a NASA partnership. It launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9/Dragon CRS-19 resupply mission on 5 December 2019, was carried to the International Space Station, and was deployed into orbit on 19 February 2020.

The 1-kilogram technology-demonstration satellite tested inter-satellite communication with the commercial Globalstar constellation to evaluate whether low-cost CubeSats could relay data through an existing satellite-phone network rather than requiring dedicated ground stations. The project was carried out with NASA, Mexico's national science council CONACYT, the state of Puebla's CONCYTEP, Mexico's Ministry of Economy, and partner universities BUAP and UACH, alongside Mexico's national space agency AEM.

Following AztechSat-1, the UPAEP team developed Gxiba-1, a follow-on CubeSat intended to monitor Mexico's active volcanoes and track volcanic ash dispersal for aviation and public-safety alerts. The program is funded through university and government science grants rather than commercial revenue and continues to train Mexican engineering students in spacecraft design, integration and operations. It is one of a small number of Latin American university programs with an orbital flight heritage of its own hardware.