Mika Schultes, Hamburg Space Team, student at TU Hamburg
Learning by Launching?
Building Student Spaceflight in Hamburg
Access to space is changing. Falling launch costs, smaller spacecraft and increasingly accessible technologies are creating opportunities that would have been almost unimaginable for student teams only a few decades ago. Today, students can conduct their own experiments and design, build and test rockets and satellites, gaining hands-on experience long before entering the aerospace industry.
The newly founded Hamburg Space Team (HST) brings this opportunity to Hamburg. Today, around 70 students from fields ranging from mechanical and electrical engineering to physics take genuine responsibility for complex engineering work, from initial design to flight.
In this lecture, we will offer an inside look at how HST was built. Along the way, we will present some of the projects currently being developed within HST – including student-built rocket experiments, satellite projects and launch vehicle development – and discuss the engineering and organisational challenges behind them.
The lecture will also look beyond Hamburg. Student aerospace initiatives are increasingly becoming an important part of Europe’s space ecosystem, serving as training grounds for future space engineers, as platforms for rapid experimentation and, in some cases, as the origins of new companies and technologies.
Ultimately, the talk asks a simple question: How far can students go when they are given the opportunity to build, test and launch for real?
Mika Schultes is a member of the board of the Hamburg Space Team and Mission Lead of BOLT (Beamed Optical Light Transmission). Since 2024, he has been studying Mechanical Engineering for a Bachelor of Science degree at TUHH.
Weitere Informationen zum Inhalt des Vortrags hier im PDF (Download).
Organisation: RAeS Hamburg in cooperation with the DGLR, VDI, ZAL and HAW
Die Veranstaltung findet ausschließlich in Präsenz statt. Weitere Informationen hier.
