The largest rocket launched by a team of students in Spain

The BiSKY Team creates and successfully tests the largest rocket launched by a team of students in Spain.

The BiSKY Team, from the Bilbao School of Engineering of the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), successfully completed the launch of the ‘Charlie’ rocket on December 27, 2022, from the Spanish Army maneuver field in San Gregorio (Zaragoza). With its 3.2 meters in length and 20 centimeters in diameter, it is the largest rocket launched by a team of students in Spain.

With ‘Charlie’, moreover, the UPV/EHU rocket team also surpassed its previous altitude record, now reaching 3.5 kilometers in height. This places it as the second rocket made by students in Spain that has flown the highest, only behind the Bondar rocket in which the BiSKY Team also participated in collaboration with the Catalan Cosmic Research team.

“The first two rockets launched by the team were named Alpha and Bravo respectively, and both achieved an altitude record for the team. Later, other rockets have been launched, such as Ganymede or Io. However, these rockets were not intended to beat the team’s height mark, but to test systems such as flight electronics or parachute deployment. The Charlie rocket represents a significant leap in scale compared to the team’s previous rockets”, reveals Jon Pérez, student of the Master’s in Industrial Engineering at the Bilbao School of Engineering and Team Leader of the BiSKY Team.

A moment of launch preparations. (Photo: BISKY Team / UPV/EHU)

Beyond this milestone, the team is clear about the steps to take in the coming months. “We want to launch rockets with a hybrid engine, which means including valves, tanks, sensors and other equipment that make the vehicle necessary to be more voluminous. Working with larger rockets poses new challenges, both technical and logistical, which is why it has been possible to acquire ‘Know-how’ in this aspect with Charlie”, explains Pérez.

The ultimate goal of the team is to reach space, 100 kilometers high. “This is a very ambitious challenge, and it will require time and a multitude of tests and previous developments to reach that goal. For this, the next short-medium term objective is to develop a rocket with its own hybrid engine, since having a propulsion system designed by us will allow us to size the rocket according to our needs”.

Launch operations began 3 hours before takeoff at the San Gregorio de Zaragoza maneuvering field, at 8:00. During these preliminary works, the team installed the launch rail, prepared the rocket and ensured that the weather conditions were suitable for launch. With everything ready, the rocket took flight at 11:15 a.m., reaching more than 1,000 km/h in a few seconds. Once at the highest point of the flight, the electronics developed by the team detonated some pyrotechnic charges with which the secondary parachute was deployed, so that the rocket descended at a limited speed. When the rocket was only 400 meters high, the electronics activated again to deploy a second parachute, this one larger, with the aim of making the rocket land softly.

The BiSKY Team was born in the 2017-2018 academic year, at the Bilbao School of Engineering and, since then, has launched six rockets and built its own rocket engine. This last year has been particularly good for BiSKY Team, having carried out four launches of three different rockets, doubling the total number of launches the team has in a single year. Progress has also been made on the development of a second hybrid rocket motor prototype, which is a key technology for the team’s future projects.

Currently, the team is made up of 50 students from different training lines at the center and is divided into six subgroups, depending on the tasks they perform in the team: Propulsion, aimed at developing engines that are tested on test benches; Aerodynamics, in charge of the design of the aerodynamic surfaces of the rockets; Structure, which addresses the mechanical design of structural elements, both for rockets and auxiliary structures; Avionics, whose responsibility is the development of both hardware and software for on-board electronics; Control and Simulation, focused on the instrumentation of test benches and simulator development, and Business & Management, which is responsible for the internal organization and marketing of the team. (Source: UPV/EHU)