STANFORD, California — We’ve known that the DIY ethic is good for modding your Roomba or building a beer bong, but groups of college students have taken the movement to the next level: space.

Working on shoestring budgets and short timelines, duct tape and tape measures, CubeSat enthusiasts build 4-inch square satellites and then piggyback their dreams on bigger missions’ rockets. They do it dirty and cheap, but their results are competitive with their spendier counterparts.

The CubeSat strategy was pioneered at Stanford University in the Space and Systems Development Laboratory, now headed by Andrew Kalman, a consulting professor. In this Wired Science video, Kalman explains how CubeSats came to be, how they’re built, and why they’re important.

What was just a concept 10 years ago is now a thriving way of accessing space at very low cost. Now, even NASA is giving the idea the thumbs up. Tuesday, a new nanosatellite will take a ride into orbit on a Minotaur 1 rocket. The entire satellite is just 4 inches tall and 12 inches long, like three standard CubeSats stuck together. PharmaSat, as the NASA Ames project is known, will carry a small payload of yeast, which it will feed with nutrient liquid — and then attempt to kill — over the course of 100 hours.

The project is supposed to test the effectiveness of antifungals in killing microbes in space. It turns out that low-gravity conditions can do strange things to earthling cells, including making them more virulent. If we’re going to send humans, with their huge complements of bacterial ecosystems into space, we need to know how microbes react to the low-gravity environment.

While the PharmaSat project adopts some of the CubeSat methods, keep in mind that it still helps to have NASA behind you. The agency spent $3 million on PharmaSat, mostly bringing the rigor of the CubeSat up to NASA standards.

“I don’t think we’re using exotic or one of-a-kind products,” said Bruce Yost, PharmaSat mission manager at NASA Ames. “It’s how it’s put together.”

PharmaSat grew out of an earlier proof-of-concept CubeSat project called GeneSat, which proved that engineers could send up a tiny satellite that would effectively nourish microbes and carry out detailed analysis of biological changes.

“PharmaSat is kind of a version 2.0 of GeneSat,” Yost said. “It’s quite a bit lot more complicated. It will handle more valves and fluids and microwells. I tell people sometimes that it’s GeneSat on steroids.”

Even though the experiment will only take 100 hours or so, the limited bandwidth available to the satellite — which maxes out at 9600 baud — means that the PharmaSat will be beaming data down for months after the yeast die.

See Also:

WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal’s Twitter, Google Reader feed, and book site for The History of Our Future; Wired Science on Facebook.