Collective Seed
$5 Pooled Contribution · No Separate Hardware
Technical Overview
Collective Seed has no engineering blueprint of its own, intentionally — it is a $5 contribution that pools with other seeds, by community type, until there is enough committed interest to open a new Sentinel Collective campaign. When a campaign opens for your community, your seed is credited toward your founding backer slot on that campaign's Sentinel 1U satellite (the same platform documented on the Sentinel Collective page). If no campaign opens for your community within 24 months, your $5 is fully refunded.
Subsystem Blueprints
What Your Seed Funds — Sentinel 1U
- ·1U CubeSat, 100×100×113.5 mm, 877 g CBE
- ·437.525 MHz UHF downlink / 145.825 MHz VHF uplink
- ·LoRa 915 MHz store-and-forward message payload
- ·Passive magnetic ADCS, 550 km / 53° orbit
- ·12-month design lifetime (18-month design target)
Every Collective Seed pools toward the same Sentinel 1U platform documented in full on the Sentinel Collective blueprint page — identical structure, EPS, OBC, COMMS, ADCS, and payload. There is no separate "seed-tier" satellite design; seeds gauge and pool community demand before a campaign opens.
Seed Pooling Mechanism
- ·Tracked per community type in our database
- ·Linked to a campaign once one opens for that community
- ·Public seed/campaign counts shown on the Collective page
- ·No campaign opened in 24 months → automatic refund
Seeds are recorded against a community category (HAM Radio, Prepper/Survival, Rural Community, International/Diaspora, Student/Academic, Other). Once enough seeds accumulate in a category to justify opening a new Sentinel Collective campaign, that campaign is created and existing seed contributors are credited toward a founding backer slot. This is the literal mechanism implemented in our backend, not a marketing abstraction.
Assembly & Build Sequence
Choose your community type. Your contribution is recorded against that category and counted publicly toward the case for opening a new campaign.
Your $5 sits alongside every other seed in your category. There is no fixed published threshold — campaigns open when there is enough demonstrated interest to justify starting a Sentinel 1U build.
When your community's campaign opens, it follows the same Sentinel Collective mechanics: 100 founding backers at $29 each, tracked live on the Collective page.
Your $5 seed is credited toward your founding backer slot on the new campaign rather than charged again from zero.
If no campaign opens for your community within 24 months of your contribution, you receive a full refund automatically — no action required.
Why Seeds Exist
Sentinel Collective campaigns cost real engineering and procurement time to open — the bill of materials alone runs roughly $32,700 per satellite (see the Sentinel Collective blueprint). We do not want to open a 100-backer campaign for a community that will not actually fill it.
Collective Seed exists to de-risk that decision: a low-commitment way to register real demand before we commit engineering and procurement resources to a specific community's satellite.
This is intentionally not a hardware product page. For the engineering specification of the satellite your seed eventually funds, see the Sentinel Collective blueprint.