Just when world politics is discussing corona pandemics, climate change and clean energy, young students from “FH Upper Austria, Campus Steyr”, made a leap forward and designed their first satellites with the mission to retrieve space debris from the orbit as a part of an assignment in an extracurricular activity. So, lean in and learn more on an experimental critical design review (CDR) that took place as a final presentation of the course “Introduction in the space travel” for bachelor programme students at “FH Upper Austria, Campus Steyr”, because this design project virtually almost led to a major disagreement between “China” and “US”, and fortunately, Dr. Gernot Grömer was able to prevent a possible global escalation! ;-)

On Tuesday, 18-Jan-2022, 23 smart future engineers organised in five groups, held their final critical design review (CDR) presentations, which were pre-evaluated and previously discussed a week earlier by a review board – Dr. Grömer, and two external reviewers – Phillip Staudinger, CFO of Peak Technology GmbH, and me. Every group showed their design and project plan, and the costs of the mission. You can imagine, this kind of a project has an impact worldwide and can raise many regulatory issues. Why? Well, you have to think and consider every step of the project: Where do you want to launch your rocket? How big? Which space debris do you want to retrieve? How do you want to do it? What if your system fails? And just when you think you had successfully completed your mission, you accidentally collected an unauthorised ancient satellite… Suddenly, your successful mission could be part of a global political scandal that could be a ground for war. Having said that, now you can understand that the check of the CDR had to be thorough such as those of a real space mission.

Inclination, weight, timelines, system architecture, space launch, the complete mass, budget, power costs, and safety were discussed. The ideas were brilliant; the suggestions were satellites designed with a mother and five daughter modules, and a single module with a robotic arm. The mission would take approx. one year, and the goal was to retrieve 5 satellites. The duration of the projects was variable, from seven to ten years maximum.

In the end, the ideas were polished to a perfect degree and were a complete success! This CDR review showed us that super geniuses are not only born at NASA, ESA, or in Marvel movies, but also at “FH Upper Austria, Campus Steyr” or to be precise at the extracurricular activity “Introduction in the space travel” at FH Upper Austria, Campus Steyr/PMT Bachelor-Programme.

Author: Ivana Turek, OeWF