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Mission Statement

The mission of HSFL is to promote space engineering and science research for the exploration of space, to develop, launch, and operate small spacecraft from the Hawaiian Islands, to accelerate the validation of new space technologies, to provide workforce training in all aspects of unmanned space missions, and to promote synergistic collaborations between educational, governmental, and corporate institutions interested in space exploration.

The Hawaii Space Flight Laboratory (HSFL) was established in May 2007 within the College of Engineering (CoE) and the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST). The HSFL is a multidisciplinary research and education center bringing together researchers from diverse areas to work on the exploration and understanding of the space environment. The objectives of HSFL are:

To provide the infrastructure for joint collaborative space engineering and science research on enabling technologies for the exploration of space.
To support the collaborative communication between researchers at the University of Hawaii at Manoa in diverse fields with external researchers from industry, governmental agencies, and academia.
To encourage entrepreneurship and industrial relations to increase relevance and impact of the engineering and scientific research and education provided by CoE and SOEST.
To provide students with a rich, diversified, and exciting education that will prepare them for careers in development, research, and engineering.
To encourage interaction between a core science strength of SOEST (space science) with the engineering expertise of CoE (exploration engineering) and to provide the engineering support for the advancement of science in this field.
To promote synergistic collaborations between academic organization, industry, and governmental agencies which will be invited to form collaborative partnerships with HSFL.

Hawaii is located in a unique position to become a low-cost gateway to space and to place the University of Hawaii as the only university in the world to have both satellite fabrication capabilities and unique, direct access to orbital space. This will enable many experiments that study the earth's oceans and continents, as well as test numerous engineering experiments in the hostile environment of space.

University of Hawaii participants will design, build, launch, and operate microsatellites in the 1 - 150 kg range that can be configured for a variety of science and educational tasks. The HSFL expands the Small-Satellite Program begun five years ago at the College of Engineering, which has attracted international attention. The HSFL is headed by Director Luke Flynn, Hawaii Institute of Geophysics and Planetology (SOEST), and Co-Director Wayne Shiroma, College of Engineering.