By firing these thrusters in different combinations, the system can apply a small force or torque in any desired direction.

A typical RCS consists of several key components: 

Thrusters: These are the small rocket engines that produce thrust. They can be of different types, such as cold gas thrusters, which use compressed gas, or monopropellant thrusters and bipropellant thrusters, which use chemical reactions to generate thrust.

Propellant Management System: This includes the fuel tanks, valves, and piping that store and deliver the propellant to the thrusters.

Control System and Algorithms: This is the “brain” of the system. It processes data from sensors (like gyroscopes and star trackers) and commands from the ground or onboard computers to determine which thrusters to fire, for how long, and in what sequence to achieve the desired movement.The 2023 NOA internship program entailed the replication of the BPS Space RCS Demo. The demo was originally built by Joe Barnard from YouTube. The project was intended to be an entry into aerospace engineering for NOA interns to give them a glimpse of the experience of building rocket and spacecraft subsystems. 

The team of interns that was led by Ryan Sendege was split into two teams:

The electrical team which included Bradley Tumwine, Arinitwe Joseph and Ian Beine worked on the electronic circuitry. They designed an avionics circuit that controlled whole system mainly using a Teensy 3.2 Microcontroller, solenoid valves and other supporting components.The mechanical team included Ryan Sendege and Innocent Anywar who worked on the mechanical build that mostly consisted of a PVC pipe, 3D printed frame and tubing.With the help of Camille Dardass, an aerospace engineer from France and supervision from David Tusubira and Navneet Singh, the team was able to achieve single axis balance after many iterations that were aided by MATLAB simulations.