  CubeSats are routinely used for low-cost photometry from space. Space-borne
spectroscopy, however, is still the exclusive domain of much larger platforms.
Key astrophysical questions in e.g. stellar physics and exoplanet research
require uninterrupted spectral monitoring from space over weeks or months. Such
monitoring of individual sources is unfortunately not affordable with these
large platforms. With CUBESPEC we plan to offer the astronomical community a
low-cost CubeSat solution for near-UV/optical/near-IR spectroscopy that enables
this type of observations. CUBESPEC is a generic spectrograph that can be
configured with minimal hardware changes to deliver both low resolution (R=100)
with very large spectral coverage (200-1000nm), as well as high resolution
(R=30,000) over a selected wavelength range. It is built around an off-axis
Cassegrain telescope and a slit spectrograph with configurable dispersion
elements. CUBESPEC will use a compact attitude determination and control system
for coarse pointing of the entire spacecraft, supplemented with a fine-guidance
system using a fast steering mirror to center the source on the spectrograph
slit and to cancel out satellite jitter. An extremely compact optical design
allows us to house this instrument in a 6U CubeSat with a volume of only
10x20x30cm$^{3}$, while preserving a maximized entrance pupil of ca.
9x19cm$^{2}$. In this contribution, we give an overview of the CUBESPEC
project, discuss its most relevant science cases, and present the design of the
instrument.
