NASA, ESA or Elon Musk: They all saw countless fireballs in the sky before they mastered the launch of rockets. Gießen students made it on the first attempt. It was only 880 meters high, about as high as the Feldberg is above sea level. But the goals of the “Spaceflight Rocketry Gießen ” club grow with success: soon they want to compete against teams from all over Europe.

“Above all, we would like to bring a little more practice into our course of study,” says Julia Eff. She is a student of the subject “Physics and Technology for Space Applications” offered jointly by the Technical University of Central Hesse ( THM ) and the Justus Liebig University of Gießen (JLU). And she is chairwoman of the association, abbreviated as SPROG, which brings together interested parties from other departments and areas. “We also have doctors and computer scientists,” says Eff. Because in the complex subject of rocket building, there are tasks for every profession.

So it took not only a year and a half from the idea to the launch of the first own rocket at a place near Bremen that specializes in student and hobby projects, but also expertise from mechanical engineering to physics to programmeming. Except for the purchased fuel, the rocket, dubbed “PIPE”, is completely self-built from fiberglass composite and epoxy resin. “For example, it is not trivial to construct the nose,” explains Eff. It is not comparable to the simple circular cone of a New Year's Eve rocket, but has a complex shape. “We printed them, along with many other components, in the THM 3D printing center,” says Eff.

For their first launch, the team of around 40 people had set themselves several goals - first and foremost, of course, the "proof of concept" that their own design is airworthy. “PIPE” should be able to climb at least 500 meters without any errors, and the self-programmemed components should also work. Communication and the self-designed parachute system were particularly important to the young rocket builders. “The rocket should reach the bottom in one piece,” says Eff. There are more than 5,000 euros in the prototype, the majority from the budget of the JLU student parliament, sponsorship money and a grant from the German Aerospace Society (DGLR). “If there were any doubts about success, we would have preferred not to fly.”

And after arriving in carpools, the team actually canceled the first of two starting slots on the first weekend in August. “We had problems with the electronics and the landing system,” describes Eff. A transistor burned out and the rope cutter as part of the parachute system was defective. The engine we bought didn't fit either, so some tasks had to be completed before the alternative date on Sunday. The hardware problems were solved with a 3D printer, spare parts and an inventive spirit. Another question came up suddenly: “An hour before the start, the organizer told us that he expected the flight altitude to be significantly higher than the planned one because the engine was more powerful than expected,” says Eff. This caused a lot of hectic activity: the deployment of the parachute had to be done redundantly using a time and air pressure measurement. But if the rocket were still rising at that point, it would fly into its own canopy. “So we recalculated and adjusted everything right up to the last moment,” reports the student.

Successfully. At a height of 880 meters, a perfect deployment of the parachute system, a soft landing - the failure of the small scientific payload was all tolerable. “The project opened the eyes of many people as to how they want to continue their studies: in the direction of design or programmeming, fuel system development or organization and planning,” concludes Eff. Also valuable: practical scientific work. The students wrote documentation of the entire process and filled laboratory notebooks. “We recorded every step and what we learned from it.”

With this knowledge we can now move on to the next rocket: It should have several stages, rise up to 3000 meters - and take part in competitions such as the European Rocketry Challenge (EuRoC) participate.