Marco Straubel
Marco studied Mechatronics, giving him a broad interdisciplinary engineering background spanning mechanics, electronics, and software. He began his career at the German Aerospace Center (DLR), where he specialized in deployable spacecraft structures, mechanisms, and lightweight design. His work in this field culminated in a doctoral thesis on a large rollable synthetic-aperture radar antenna for Earth observation and included research stays at NASA and ESA.
Over the course of his career, his focus increasingly shifted toward embedded electronics, firmware, and the integration of complex mechatronic systems. He developed electronics and software for several parabolic-flight campaigns and later for a spacecraft experiment. He has extensive experience integrating mechanical structures, sensors, actuators, avionics, and third-party hardware and software into reliable spaceflight systems.
In 2026, Marco co-founded ADPERA, a DLR spin-off developing deployable structures and integrated systems for creating large structures in space, where he serves as Chief Technology Officer.
Sessions
Conventional spacecraft cable harnesses are costly, labor-intensive and difficult to integrate, particularly when numerous sensors and actuators must be distributed across a mechanically complex structure.
For a deployable spacecraft system, we replaced much of the conventional harness with a custom rigid-flex PCB designed in KiCad. The spider-like assembly wraps around the mechanical structure and branches out to multiple functional locations, allowing sensors, switches, heaters and interfaces to be integrated without separate point-to-point wiring.
The system was launched into low Earth orbit in March 2026 and has been operating reliably since April, including rigid-flex sections installed on the exterior of the spacecraft structure.
This talk presents the KiCad design workflow, the close integration with mechanical CAD, the manufacturing and integration challenges, and the lessons learned from taking an unconventional rigid-flex design from its first fabrication run to successful operation in orbit.