The Liquids projects team of TU Wien Space Team got its start with the Base11 Space Challenge through a partnership with the University of Toronto Aerospace Team (UTAT). Throughout the development of our bi-liquid propelled rockets we tackled and completed a number of projects:
Being overly ambitious, the Base11 Space Challenge hasn't been completed by any of the participating teams, however, we started the μHoubolt and GATE projects as stepping stones for it.
GATE was a Base11/Houbolt scale Ethanol/Liquid Oxygen engine project with a nominal thrust of 8kN. In 2022, we completed a successful Hotfire test of it on our self developed and built engine test stand "Franz" which has a maximum capacity of 24kN engines.
With μHoubolt we completed the first fully successful launch and recovery of a student-built bi-liquid rocket in Europe as part of the European Rocketry Challenge (EuRoC) in 2022 with a launch to an altitude of around 2200 meters. We are especially proud of our launch procedures being fully remote controlled as soon as any propellant and pressurants are loaded, as well as the light-weight nature of the rocket weighing in at 13kg fully tanked including 1kg of payload.
As a follow-up to that success, we started the Lamarr project for an upscaled rocket with a nominal altitude of 9km, switching from Ethanol/Nitrous Oxide to Ethanol/Liquid Oxygen propellant. After a few years of work we managed a partially successful flight to 5.3km at EuRoC 2025 with a similarly light-weight rocket of 26.5kg fully tanked.
All of our technical documents for μHoubolt, as well as the entire software stack for it and the followup projects are open-sourced. Personally, my largest contribution to these projects is the Mission Control user interface found at web_ecui_houbolt and pnid_houbolt as well as some smaller supporting repositories linked there. Obviously though many other tasks need to be done, so I've done a good spread of assembly, ox-cleaning, test/launch procedures, mission control and much more.