Aerospace Team Graz - Who we are
We are ASTG - Aerospace Team Graz, a student rocketry club based at Graz University of Technology in Austria. The team consists of about 100 members of all different kinds of degree programs. Each year our teams goal is to participate at the annual European Rocketry Challenge in Portugal. Last year, we pushed the envelope of our hybrid engine design with ISPIDA, designed to reach an apogee of 9000 meters at EuRoC25.
ISPIDA
ISPIDA is the third hybrid engine project by ASTG, after Halcyon (2023) and Alcedo (2024) we aimed to reach the 9000 meter mark. ISPIDAs engine consists of a solid HTPB fuel with nitrous oxide as an oxidizer. The rockets systems are monitored, powered and controlled by 85 self designed PCBs located throughout the entire rocket.
ISPIDAs Avionics
ISPIDA hosts 85 SRAD (Student Researched and Developed) PCBs with a wide range of functionalities, most of them manufactured by Aisler. We design our PCBs in KiCAD and thanks to the Aisler manufacturing plugin can easily export them for manufacturing which makes the entire workflow a lot better.
Our Main Flight Computer for example, is designed to monitor the propulsion system as well as actuating the recovery system of the rocket. Besides that, it hosts another smaller sensor board PCB which has additional flight critical sensors on it. Everything from IMUs to additional accelerometers and gyroscopes which feed our Kalman Filter with as much data as possible. Assisting the flight computer are two decentralized control and actuation nodes located in the propulsion stack. They communicate with the rest of the system via the CAN bus and send critical sensor data to the flight computer whilst receiving commands back.
ISPIDAs Flight Computer shown here in our engine test bed “Penguin”.
The various subsystems of our rocket all communicate over a CANbus with each other, the flight computer, the telemetry as well as our black box. The black box is here to do one thing: log all the data. All data packs of our custom communication protocol is written by the black box PCB onto a SD card which is encased in a carbon reinforced shell that is mounted on the PCB itself. In order to help us clean all the data after a test day or a flight, the PCB also hosts a Real Time Clock powered by a button battery to assign the data packs accurate time stamps.
Another important PCB is the recovery interface:
It interfaces with our rockets backplane and the flight computer. It hosts the recovery igniter terminals which are used to actuate the first deployment parachute at apogee and the main parachute at around 450 meters above ground. There is a magnetometer located on the PCB to maximize its distance to high current circuits an their magnetic fields. The magnetometer provides us with additional data for attitude determination during flight and communicates via a I2C bus with the flight computer.
European Rocketry Challenge - EuRoC 2025
Annually in October the EuRoC is hosted by the Portuguese Space Agency in Portugal. Since 2021 ASTG has been participating with a rocket launch. 2025 was particular exciting as ISPIDA is our most advanced hybrid rocket to date and it reached an apogee of 9366 meters. We won not just the 9k hybrid category but the overall EuRoC award as well. All of this would have not been possible without the partnership with Aisler, thanks to their support we were able to push the boundaries of our electronics design whilst also meeting rigorous EuRoCs design requirements!
We are truly grateful for Aislers partnership and their contribution to ISPIDAs success at EuRoC 2025.
Their support has been invaluable from the start to the end of the project!!