hackmas2026 - Student Rocketry in Vienna - A Story about Rockets, Satellites, Co.; - TU Wien Space T

Uh welcome to my presentation about the TV space team. Uh the TV space team is a student association um from mainly students from the TUNI but not only we also have students from uh other universities with us in our association. And yeah, here you get a small a rough idea of how many active members we usually have. And yeah, about me for a short uh quickly about me. Um I'm also a forever student. So I'm in my I don't know 13th semester or something by now. Uh electrical engineering and I've been a space team member since 2022. And since this year I'm also the president of our association. But what do we do? So the space the the name space team kind of gives a hint. Uh we mainly build rockets but not only rockets. We also have a cube satellite project and we are also working on autonomous drones currently. Um usually the students like me don't really have the uh don't really are known to be good handymen you know like to to be capable with with uh tools and stuff. So the the space team kind of the spirit of the space team is to um give the students an opportunity to actually do hands-on stuff uh while they are studying because during studies you usually um are very theoretically and don't really get that much practice. So in 2010 um a few students were uh in in in in France and in France there is a a rocketry competition where you can launch uh model rockets and they attended this competition and they were so fascinated by that that they decided okay we want to have something like this in Austria as well and back in the time none of the universities in Austria had something like is so they asked the TV to if they can have a small room or anything where they could begin building their own rockets and the year after they went to France they returned to France to this competition with the first own rocket. Uh this picture is already the second attempt hence the O2 on the rocket. STR stands for space team rocket. So space STR02 is our second rocket. This is our our founder Fabian Duchel and the the the association since 2010 grew massively. We now have besides this one rocket, we now launched many more rockets, more than 100 rockets by now. Uh and we have three main um projects. The satellite project, a biquid rocketry project and the drone project across Austria. And then we have a lot a lot more older projects and smaller projects on the side. So we have a lot of already finished um projects behind us and quite a lot of experience in the whole association. Today I'm going to keep it pretty um simple I'd say. So we're going to talk about two types of rockets. Um beginning with the solid engine rockets. It's the booster motors you see on on for example the space shuttle on the outside. So the solid motor is just like your firework rocket. You have uh a crane inside of the booster. Um if you light it one time, it starts to burn and it won't stop burning until all the fuel is spent. So you can't really regulate or control this motor. It just burns and gives you thrust and you have to deal with that. Those are the more simpler rockets. So those are the rockets with which we started. We don't produce our motors, we buy them currently. Uh and one of the largest projects we did with solid motors was the Hound. The Hound, you can see the concept here on the side is a 4 m tall two- stage rocket. Uh and its mission was basically to reach the edge of space. So 100 kilometers of height above ground uh the the edge of space the the common line uh was its was its goal and to achieve this we had the big booster which propelled it to 13 to 20 km of height then the upper stage would separate and the second stage would travel the rest. um we had many attempts. So the first attempt was in 2018 and then um up until 2023 we launched this rocket in the USA. And here in this we also had smaller test um launches. Here in this picture you see what happens once the rocket reaches its highest point. Our rockets are all just passively stabilized which means we don't control them in the air. They are supposed to fly straight up and more or less fall straight down on a parachute. That's the idea. Um because in Austria it's a bit tricky. If you build a controlled rocket, you're immediately in um you're immediately in the military sector and obviously that's forbidden and that's also explicitly not our goal. So we're completely um [clears throat] we stay on the civilian side and all our rockets are experimental in nature but yeah also all our rockets are coming down on a parachute like this. So here are a few impressions of the launch in the USA. The in Europe you can't really launch a rocket into space that easily. you would have to go to one of the official space ports, for example, Andoya in Norway or in Scotland there is another one. So in the US they have big uh deserts like the Black Rockck Desert. Um best known for the Burning Man festival uh and you have a lot of space. So if anything goes wrong, the rocket can just fly wherever and the chances of hitting anybody are pretty low. So that's why you can launch in the US up to 200 kilometers of height. So we headed with our rocket to the US. Then you meet your you rent yourself an apartment where you begin assembling the rocket because it's get shipped in the container. You get the freight crate and there are just a bunch of loose parts in there. Then you have to drive I don't know 100 200 miles into the desert in the middle of the desert uh where you then set up camp your launch platform and then you get to launch your rocket. We usually do in the US or rather did uh two launches minor and major. So, the minor rocket was a smaller version of this two- stage rocket with only a goal of 50 kilometers, more like a precursor to get all the um crown station equipment and all that stuff in order and to check um if any modifications, last minute modifications are necessary. So, here are a few pictures of the smaller rocket. Oh, you can see on the left there how tall the whole setup is. So, the rocket is rather thin, but it's still 4 m tall. Uh, and it weighs, I believe, around 20 to 30 kg somewhere in this range. It has no payload. So, this rocket is optimized for lightweight. It has no function. It has no payload. It's just supposed to fly high. Here's the aftermath of uh the the minor launch. didn't work out quite as planned, but it was better than nothing. The rocket didn't completely disintegrate and the parachute worked. However, the upper stage was not recovered as far as I know. Yeah, right. That's the upper stage. Uh, the upper stage didn't come down on its parachute. It came down ballistically and was duck itself into the desert ground. Should I go slower? Okay, here you can see a rocket launch. Here we have a rocket launch in slow motion. Um, it is pretty loud in in real time. And that's the real-time video. The the vertical frame is about 1,000,000 m. So the acceleration is pretty quick and it's very rare that we get onboard footage but we managed to actually get on board for this particular launch. But here we are in the booster stage. So before the two rockets >> there it goes way up there. >> I think we lost a fin or we lost all sense of responsibility. >> I would go back right here. You can see the separation because once the second stream starts there at this point the second broken rocket motor um lit up. What you also see is a corkcrew which is commonly known as Um this is an this was due to an aerodynamic instability. So the upper stage wasn't stable enough um and it started to tumble and once this tumbling since it's not controlled we can't uh correct it. If this tumbling gets too much it eventually will eventually will just more or less flip around and do this crocs screw spiral. So also this rocket which was supposed to reach out or not out of space uh to reach the space um did fail. Come on. Nope. Nope. Yeah. So also this rocket um met the desert floor because once the rocket um got in this quarks crew um the parachute system doesn't really work as intended. The parachute system is designed to deploy when the rocket is at its lowest point. Um so right at the top of its um yeah at its apogee. Um but here the system detected a non-nominal state. So it deployed the recovery system, the parachute, but a rocket went like four to or five mark, so four or five times the speed of sound. And that obviously rips out the parachute. So the rocket then comes down back to Earth uh ballistically and digs itself a grave. And we literally had to almost dig a grave to get all the parts of the rocket back. And it took some while. And at the end the the the um the grave we dug out was really 6 ft deep and like 2 m uh um long and 2 m deep. So it was it was a lot of earth or sand that we had to move to actually get all of the rocket back. But the most important thing the uh SD card with the with the flight data could be recovered. And here you see the major rocket together with the minor rocket or at least the rest of it. Um, we did recover more than we expected at the end of the day. But yeah, um, the Hound never reached its goal. So the Hound never reached space because after 2023, it was the fifth or fourth attempt. uh each time flying to the US and and shipping a rocket to the US uh is pretty expensive and the people working on this project worked on it for at this point almost eight or nine years. Uh they had families in the meantime so they really didn't have the time and capacity to try it yet uh yet again. Um, so yeah, the hound is currently um shelfd, but never say never. The second engine type I'm going to talk about today is the biquid engine, which is also to be found on the space shuttle. It's the three main um um combust the three main engines you can see glowing here. Um and a biquid engine is used on our Lama rocketry project. So to create um any thrust with a rocket you need fire and to create fire you need uh your oxidizer, your fuel and and heat. And if you want to convert this exothermic um um reaction into actual thrust, you need to confine it in a chamber with only one outlet so that it pushes you. So as we've discussed you can use here solid rocket motor fuels. Um here you can see from a rather big um booster I believe and you could also use like a hypergolic fuel uh where you have your oxidizer and your fuel combined kind of toxic not going to do this. So we split them apart. We have our oxidizer as a liquid and we have our fuel as a liquid. And the heat source just comes from an ignition source. And this liquid then is stored in a tank. At the beginning we used um h good question. L gas in German. Now I don't remember the thank you nitrous oxide. NOS uh and as fuel we use still use ethanol. And now we use um liquid oxygen as oxidizer because it's more efficient. And our setup within the rocket is basically this. Uh we have a pressure fed system. So you have on the bottom you have your uh rocket engine, your chamber, your combustion chamber. And then you have your fuel tank and your oxidizer tank. And on top you have your pressure tanks. Um in those tanks, in those pressured tanks is uh nitrogen gas ges nitrogen stored at 300 bar and you just have small control valves with which you can then um regulate the pressure and the nitrogen just pushes onto the fuel in the fuel tanks or onto the oxidizer in the oxidizer tank and pushes it out into the combustion chamber. And just with with um valves you can control the flow rate and the pressure. And with this concept it took us a while until we actually got a working rocket engine this way. But we reached some milestones fairly quick. Um on the left side you see France which is a test bed like a test stand for rocket engines because before you because before you can actually incorporate your engine into a rocket you need to kind of know what it's doing. So you need to test it. Um and this test stand could have uh taken up rocket engines up to 24 konton or 2.4 tons equivalent weight. And on the left you see the recovery of our first um bi liquid rocket that we've built. Here you can also see a short clip about the start. They are pretty fast so filming them is always a bit of a challenge. Um now to the components of such a biquid rocket. So you have the combustion chamber. This is pretty straightforward. It's more or less a um a cylinder and at uh you then have your nozzle at the end. But the more complex part for us was the inacctor. So you have to mix your oxidizer and your fuel so that they can actually burn. And for this we've designed our own inactor. Um through the middle path we spray in the ethanol. It then gets um it then just gets sprayed into the chamber in into fine small beads basically like small um droplets and from the outside of this inactor um along this pintle uh the liquid oxygen flows and through this and and it flows through the spray of the ethanol and through that we mix those two mixtures together and then you have a burnable combustible um fuel mixture inside your chamber which we then can ignite and also somewhat control through the flow rate. Yeah, you then first of all you need to start it up with a first ignition and then you get your fire. You can see the oxidizer tank is this is basically our naked rocket. So this is a test of our rocket without the aerodynamic structure around it. You have here here you have the inerts. Um on top you have the oxidizer tank. It's wrapped in some isolation so that it keeps a bit cooler a bit longer. Uh and down below you have the fuel tank. And on the side you can see here you can see here the the fuel lines uh going down to the chamber. they are currently routed through uh a separate path um during tanking and um the starting procedure and for the test before we can actually launch such a rocket. I mentioned before you have to test your system. Um and for this for this we have um um different types of tests. We have our water cold flow with which we just test whether the thing is actually um um whether anything trips or not. Um then we do our cold flow with um liquid oxygen to see whether our valves start freezing over. Most of the time they do, but by now we kind of have it under control. And then last but not least, we do an actual hot fire with the whole engine setup and just check if the procedures work. And then in the second run, we usually check if we manage to get the thrust we need. And this usually looks like this. So you can see the whole set of the shipping container and to mitigate the noise we tried to build around it but it didn't do anything. So it's now just there to um keep the shipping containment pack so that the flame doesn't melt any volt. Um on here you have the engine itself sits on a on a measurement bed basically with which we can measure the force and back here you have all the equipment necessary to run the engine which then later has to be incorporated into the rocket. There is also we measure temperatures, pressure, everything we can actually measure. um not as much as actual rockets would measure, but yeah um enough for us to figure out if the engine performs or not. Uh we we wish we could do more hot files like this, but usually it takes us pretty long time to get the engine and the setup running because as I mentioned before uh seros or or valves or whatever like to freeze over when you're using liquid oxygen. Here you have a beautiful picture of um one of our best hot fires so far. You can if the [snorts] if this box where our igniters were installed uh wasn't in the way we would actually have those beautiful Mac diamonds you usually see in the in the um stream. But yeah, still a pretty cool picture. Yeah, the other part of the rocket also needs to be manufactured. Um most of the things you've seen and most of the things I've shown are manufactured by ourselves in our workshop. So we have a few laves, a few mills. Uh only very few things are actually done by sponsors or other companies. Um also the the the whole fuselage and and fins and nose and all that stuff of the aeros structure of the rocket is also manufactured ourselves. And once Oh yeah, right. This is a video about how the parachute gets deployed. >> You won't see a parachute, but you see how the nose cone gets detached uh from the rest of the rocket. So the thing that popped off was the nose of the rocket, and it usually should do this at wherever the rocket reaches its highest point. Then the the whole thing needs to be controlled and needs to communicate with us. So we need a lot of avionics. Uh most of which is also done by ourselves. We have flight computers on board. We have um independent controllers on board which regulate pressures etc etc. And we have a whole our whole test stand is also completely automated by us. Um we've wrote uh we've written our own custom engine control uh software um user interface everything you need. So we have like our completely own mission control center and this is the rocket that we've then eventually built. So this is our second biquid rocket. Its mission was the European rocketry challenge in Portugal. Um the initially it was planned to start 2023 but enough technical Kremlins push this state back to 2025. So the the European rocketry challenge as I mentioned is in Portugal. Um there are many many other student associations like us and rocketry teams like us. There are three main competitions or like three main categories. You can fly your solid motor rocket. You can fly a hybrid um engineed rocket and you can fly the bilquid rocket and we obviously went there with our bilquid rocket. For this we need to stuff a transporter or sometimes even two transporters full of equipment and then we head off to Portugal to some Airbnb where we then um assemble our rocket. Before you are able to launch or allowed to launch at the competition, you need to pass a flight readiness review where you dismantle your rocket again. And you get asked um pretty much about everything from the smallest um PCB to one single 3D print you just put in there as an afterthought. Everything gets scrutinized. Um usually if you're in the back of the queue, they run out of time. So, you might get a chance to let some um irregularities slip through. Um yeah, and once you've once you've passed all that, you actually get to launch your rocket. So, here we are at some military um training um yeah, training area uh where you can safely launch your rockets um without damaging anything. You assemble your rocket and you assemble your ground support equipment like the launch rail and all the tanks and stuff like that. And then you get a launch window assigned once you're ready and you get to actually launch it. So here you see mission control which is far enough away from the rocket to be safe. And on the left you see the rocket on the launch rail. Uh I have to apologize beforehand for the bit rate. That wasn't our fault. It was the Euro uh stream which didn't have the the Yeah. which lacked this much. But as you might have seen, the rocket left the launch rail, which is good. Here you can see it fly for a short moment. And we've managed once again onboard footage two for two at this point. So that's great news. Uh and here you can also see the deployment of the parachute. So, if you're ready, you will see a yellow line and a orange piece of cloth fall out at some point. And that's the uh that's the parachute, the first smaller parachute that's deployed. It should be around now. I guess yeah, there it was pretty quick. Um, so as you could as you've seen before, the nose nose cone detaches. It gets shot off the rocket, but is still attached to a string so it doesn't fall to the ground on its own. And while it's get shot, while it's getting shot off the rocket, it pulls out the first parachute. And then it's supposed to pull out a second parachute right about now, which didn't happen as planned. The second parachute uh did come out partially but couldn't really um um unfold. So it couldn't really break as much as it should have. So our rocket hit the hit the ground a bit harder than anticipated but since the first parachute the the so-called trogue shoot um still worked it wasn't too bad. So you can see our rocket was tangled in some trees or in the in the bush. Um but overall the rocket was in still good shape. We couldn't have flown it again. This wasn't possible because the the um fin can in the back the the fins sustained a bit of damage and the um rocket engine the chamber itself the cylindrical part on the left also broke off. uh but all in all no none of the um critical components like seros or valves or anything like this or the tanks were damaged. So in this regard it was still a success. Sadly the the European rocketry challenge didn't value it as much as we did. So we didn't get any points for that. They just saw okay our height wasn't the full 9 km we aimed for. was only 5.3, which is still good. We weren't allowed we weren't allowed to tank our rocket fully. Uh happens. Um but still, so we we didn't manage to get full points, but we managed to fly a rocket, and that's still a great achievement for us. Here you can see it afterwards um at the uh post-flight review. Yeah, that's all we have regarding rockets today. Then let me we're good in time then let me just talk about the satellite and the drone project real quick. So all those projects more or less um are working in parallel. So we have a group of rocket engineers, we have a group who are working on the cube satellite and we have a third group working on drones and the satellite is called space team satins or short STS one. Oh, sorry. One, not its mission. So, it's a cube satellite. Um, it's 10 by 10 by 10 by 10 cm uh big. So, this this size more or less. And its mission is to provide students, high school students um with a laboratory in space. So we want this uh satellite to be launched up into low earth orbit up to 500 kilometers or whatever um our launch provider will give us but 500 would be the aim. And then on board of this um um satellite will be a Raspberry P Raspberry Pi computer uh together with a PCB with a lot of um um measurement systems. So we can measure temperature, magnetic field, UV um radiation. We have a camera and we have a bespoke dose from cyber stove as well on this um satellite. So you can actually measure radiation in space. And the idea is that we provide um students, high school students with kits to assemble their own test version uh of this measurement PCB and then they can write code for the satellite to um they can write code and this code is then run on the satellite. um they have to read out all the sensors they've got and they then have to package also the data a bit because our bit rate or data rate isn't that great out of space. So they have to be concise to get as much data as possible out of it and then they send it back to Earth and they've got real data out of space. At least that's the idea. So the internals of the of the satellite are broken down into three main components. You have the COBC. The CBC it's the onboard computer manages um the data links um the communication to the ground um and the communication to the Raspberry Pi. You have the EPS the the um power system module which manages just the power through coming from the solar panels and storing access power in the batteries. So when the satellite is on the shadow side of the earth, um it still runs. And then you have the EDO um um system which is the Raspberry Pi more or less for the students to run their code on. Here are the projected um orbits or the projected orbit that we are aiming for. Uh so again it's about 500 kilometers uh in height and it gives us about two windows per day where we can actually man uh communicate with our satellite and each window is closed pretty quickly. So it's only six minutes one time in uh at around 10:00 in the morning and then in the evening again for 5 and a half minutes. At least [snorts] that's the projection. We have a crown station on top of the TUV with which we can directly communicate uh with our satellite. This is the only crown station with which we can also send up code to the satellite. Um theoretically it is part of the Sutnox um system. So other people could receive data from our satellite if it flies over their uh ground stations. Here you see a few impressions of how we assembled this thing. So we don't really have something like a clean room or anything. It's just a office. Um but we and we use this office to assemble many of our PCBs. Um because from the manufacturer they often don't come perfectly assembled. So you have to um tweak some things. And the gray box is our laboratory in which we put our systems to test them for longer times. Uh, again, not really a clean room or anything, but better than nothing. So, it protected us. It protected the satellite from the worst of it. And it worked. So, the satellite actually works. Um, here you can see how it's assembled. We have this aluminum frame which is laid out here. And you have your individual PCBs which then get stacked up uh upon those um pins more or less. And then you assembled the whole frame together on and on the outside obviously come the solar panels. And once it's assembled, it's packaged with a little measuring tape. The measuring tape is our antenna. Um we used measuring tape because it springs open and stays in shape more or less. So when it's packaged, it's folded over the cube and then once it's out of the rocket, a small burn wire will burn through and deploy the antenna. And the um steel from the measurement tape will roughly take the shape of a quattro quattro pole. Here's the team. And here you can also get an idea of how big the satellite is. So we'll probably never see it with a telescope or anything. uh but we hopefully will hear from it. Um we have already a few cooperations with schools around Austria. So many in Vienna but also some in in for Alber or yeah like all around Austria. Um and those schools cooperate with us to already produce prototypes or like yeah first versions of code for us to run on the satellite. So here it's looking good. We only have one issue and this issue is not us, it's a Aerospace. Isa Aerospace, maybe some of you heard of them, is a German um rocketry startup. Um they want to build a a rocket yeah a cargo rocket more or less. Um just like SpaceX does. Um and they are currently trying to get the first rocket to launch. um last year in 2025 if I remember correctly uh was the first launch [snorts] uh and it didn't go as planned. So the launch was first successful but then it wasn't. So that was the first launch. Um it's not it's not that bad if you're a rocketry startup. It's a major achievement. We we especially know what it means to uh to get a rocket off your launchpad. Um but the media and all the other people not really familiar with the with the aerospace industry saw this as a failure. Um and we are now contractually obligated uh because we've won an award or like a competition by ISA aerospace that we travel with their second launched rocket. So whatever happens to the second rocket um happens to our satellite. The chances are more likely to fail than succeed but we hope for the best. Uh the major issue currently is that it hasn't even started yet. There were many launch attempts but they all got postponed for different reasons. The closest it got um to actually launch for the second time was then postponed because a a fishing vessel uh breached the uh safety parameter around the launch site and they had to scrub in the last second and there was no time to launch that day again. And then when they tried again, I believe a few days later or so, uh they noticed an issue with one of their uh tanks. So it got postponed and I don't really know a new date for aerospace to launch. Uh by now in in I believe November, we wait for almost a year to be launched into space. So yeah, we'll see. We wish ESA aerospace this the best because that's the best for us. [snorts] Then on to the last major project kind of close but we'll finish in time I guess. Uh across Austria is a drone project which um took its mouth a bit too full. Um we want to fly across Austria as the name suggests with an autonomous drone. So there is no pilot and nobody really actively controlling the aircraft other than the autopilot. And our aim, our goal is to fly from somewhere uh inbuk back to Vienna. But you can't fly a drone just over the mountains. You have to stay within a so-called flight geography which is kept about 120 m above ground level. And on the ground you have other obstacles as well. So your space is pretty confined and on to the left and to the right you're not allowed to fly above anything [snorts] resembling a city motorway or anything inhabited more or less. So the the route planning is one of the major issues apart from building an actual aircraft. Um but we've got a few candidates of routes figured out. Most of them just follow uh valleys along Austria. So, for example, the the yellow line would fly through the Sartz Valley, then cross over to the Ants Valley and then just figure a way around um northern Stria to then land somewhere in the in the area in the metro area of Vienna. We can't fly into Vienna, obviously. To achieve this, we have on board of our aircraft, we have um an autopilot. Uh it's a Q- pilot. This is actually a commercially bought or commercially available um autopilot. So we didn't re we are not that far that we are building our own autopilots, but it has everything that we need. It has GNSS systems. It has inertial measurement units. Um it has an ADSB receiver, so we can see other aircraft, but they can't see us. Uh but maybe there will be a transceiver in the future and it can track a line and with this autopilot um the drone can fly on its own. We just program the way points in and then we just communicate in case of emergency. We just shut it down and then the drone will probably go down somewhere along its path. um also on a parachute to then actually travel this distance you need a lot of energy. So we didn't want to use um petrol because when this project was started um the aerospace or the aerrow industry was still uh pretty much committed to the goal 2050 where they wanted to have the first fully sustainable or fully CO2 neutral aircraft flying. Um by now this those things have changed. Uh investments have gone uh have dried up and projects have been put on ice but we still prevail. Uh we use hydrogen to make the distance because with purely battery power we couldn't stay within the um weight limits uh we have for our class. Um, so we use hydrogen in in gaseous form and store it in a hydrogen tank at 350 atmospheres. That's about 150 g of hydrogen. Um, and the whole tank setup on its own weighs about 3 1/2 kilog. So the fuel to weight ratio is pretty abysmal, but the energy density makes it all up for. Then we have a fuel cell which converts the hydrogen into electricity. And we use this electricity to power electric motors and a propeller. And last year in 2025 um we finally managed to build our first um boxwing. It wasn't our first aircraft but it was the first aircraft which was intended to actually make the distance. Um this boxwing design was supposed to increase efficiency. At the end of the day, it turned out due to shoddy manufacturing, you could say, because it's after all, it's more or less um model aircraft um techniques we used and not really real big aircraft techniques during manufacturing. Uh all the efficiency gains we have hoped for pretty much evaporated, but we stuck around with it because of the cool design. because not often you see an aircraft like this with um this kind of wing. Uh the idea of the efficiency gains were that you can since the the the the two wings the upper wing and the lower wing are conjoined at the wing tip they can um support each other. So you can have thinner wings uh less parasitic track and you already have a built-in winglet which are which also should help with induced track. So winglets you also see on big aircraft it's the fins at the wing tips. So far the idea but with all its edges and imperfections we probably um ruined all our efficiency gains. Um still we managed in 2025 to actually manufacture one. It took us quite a while because it's not that easy to manufacture ultra thin wings in such a manner that they actually hold up uh the aerodynamic forces. Um and then we launched it. Uh this also took us a while. Uh it took us three tries to get it airborne. The first two didn't really work because we were we didn't want to build a landing gear onto it uh to save weight. So, we tried with this go-kart thingy, this skateboard thingy down there. Uh, this didn't work out. Then, we put on a landing gear, and on the third try, it actually took off, but got immediately unstable. And because the autopilot wasn't yet correctly um set up, that was the purpose of this first flight. Uh, it flipped over and crashed 30 m behind the runway. I believe it's not in this uh presentation. No, it's not. Um, but yeah, so this aircraft is currently gone. We've decided to not rebuild it because it took us too long. And we're currently working on a conventional aircraft because at the end of the day, uh, we want to achieve the mission across Austria and not necessarily build the most complex aircraft in the world. But yeah, we're still working on this. So in general um there is might the question why are we doing this? I mean I guess for this public for for this audience here it's not so much a surprise. We all know why we're doing this because it's fun. Um but how do you get the idea? Um because someone many people of us just thought yeah it's going to be easy and [snorts] that's why at the end we do these things. you just learn about the problems as in um as you go and then you're so far in that you have to solve the problems. But again, I believe this audience knows exactly this feeling. So yeah, thank you very much um for your attention. I'm now open to questions and otherwise I wish you a pleasant evening and a pleasant hackmas. [applause] Thank. So, you're allowed to build rockets um and assemble them and all of that, but you're not allowed to um launch them from Austria. Is that >> right? in launching a rocket in Austria is is pretty difficult to get the permits um because most of the farmers don't want to have debris falling onto their um um farmland and to talk with all the farmers in around uh launch parameter and if you launch quite high you have a large parameter obviously um you would have to talk to hundreds and hundreds of different people and most of them are not so keen on you trampling the crops. So in Austria it's difficult. We do have one rocket launch in Austria and that's in cooperation with the Iserero. The iso is the uh education unit more or less of the of the European Space Agency. Um so there is one rocket launch in Austria. The smaller rockets we launch in Germany and the larger rockets we launch in Portugal or there are other opportunities in Hungary or Poland or uh as mentioned in the beginning France as well. And for the very large rockets you have to go to the US or Canada. >> Thank you. >> Any other questions? Ah, you've got the mic >> regarding the STS1 onwards and outwards. as far as I'm aware is targeting some synchronous orbit. But you were talking about Leo and and the sun and the battery. Where are you going then exactly with SDS1? >> Uh 500 km from from ground basically. So we are more or less in the same orbit as the ISS. The ISS is about 400 km and I don't know how often we will um round the earth six times nine times something like this. But it will go pretty fast around around the earth. And whenever it it's over Vienna, we have a small window to communicate. >> All right. I believe fourth row was a question. >> How do you protect the satellite uh at 500 kilometers above ground? >> So we are still within the earth's magnetic field for a good part. So most of the cosmic rays shouldn't kill us right away. Um the duration of which the duration with which we uh which we expect that the satellite will survive in orbit um is about a year and yeah so radiation isn't our biggest concern. Our biggest concern is probably the temperature um um differences. Um you can control the you you need to make sure that the batteries stay above -20° C I believe. Um otherwise if the lithium ion batteries freeze over and we reach the shadow part of the earth of the orbit um it will die and once the the the satellite is completely powerless there is currently no option to repower it. Um, but it is a bit insulated. Um, but as far as I know, but I'm not the expert on this matter, um, the changes in in the heat cycle, so you heat it up and you cool it down should be quick enough that it never reaches a too too high or too low temperature. uh in the back. >> Is the satellite able to de-orbit itself? >> Uh currently not. No, that's a good question. in in the future it is probably going to be a necessity so that you can manually deorbit um your satellite so that there is no um space debris um flying around which is a major issue by now. Um but currently um this this satellite is allowed to deorbit on its own by just losing gradually losing altitude until it enters denser atmosphere and just uh burns up in the atmosphere. You have to prove during the application phase that none of uh the satellite will stay up in in orbit. That's an important part. But we passed this uh certification. Just to comment on this point, it's about up to 5 years depending on what orbit we will be in. We did some simulations, but okay, we don't know exactly the orbit. It will depend on what is puts us. >> Yeah. Right. the ISA aerospace um if they manage to get it in orbit which they will I'm positive um they can't guarantee on the specific orbit as of right now so they will drop us out and then it can be from 400 to I don't know 500 anything in between even lower um yeah and this will then shorten or lengthen our lifespan in in Is your rocket the only payload for with either space or test rocket or will there be other cube sets in it as well? >> No, our all our rockets some of them have a payload because they are required for example by the European rocketry challenge but it's not really a useful payload. It's more like you need to shoot up I don't know a kilogram or something. Um most of as far as I'm concerned yeah only the concert rockets the the only rockets start in Austria only they have actual payload. All the other rockets are just for shits and giggles more or less. Um they they usually their only mission is to reach a certain height and to prove a certain engine concept. I hope this was the correct I hope I understood the question correctly. Okay, more questions then. Thank you very much for the talk. >> You're welcome. [applause]