Colibri flight #1 - First student-built rocket hopper! 🚀

For the first time, students have designed, built, and flown a rocket hopper! 🚀

We have conducted our first attempt at a tethered flight of Colibri. The flight went according to plan, the vehicle ascended to 1m above its launch position, hovered for 8 seconds before shutting down its engine and being caught by the safety harness. The total flight duration was 10 seconds, long enough to demonstrate the throttling capability of our engine, as well as attitude and position control provided by the thrust vector control and reaction control system. We have gathered all the data we wanted and are currently pursuing all the improvements we can implement before the second flight.

This flight is a major milestone for our project and it certainly would not have been possible to get to this point without the help of our sponsors. We would like to thank all the people that have supported us and believed in our team for the past 3 years.

It has been a long journey and a lot of work still lies ahead of us, but this accomplishment is a great start for our tethered test flight campaign! 🔥

Next up will be more flights to validate our systems and make adjustments before moving to launch and landing tests without the stilts.