“For three student teams, the dream of building and working on a real space mission is coming true. At 01:50 CEST (23:50 GMT) today, a trio of student-built CubeSats were released into space as part of ESA’s Education Office ‘Fly Your Satellite!’ programme. Transmissions from the Fregat upper stage show that the door on the CubeSat deployer opened regularly, around 2 hours and 48 minutes after launch. Now the CubeSats are travelling in their final orbits, and their university teams are waiting for them to establish contact. In the first hour of flight, the CubeSats will be working autonomously in order to stabilise their motion, perform an internal health check, and deploy their antennae. Then they will establish communication with Earth.”