The biggest exhibition for the space industry of Europe “SpaceTechExpo” took place in Bremen again in November 2022 and ASTRA e.V. got to be one of the exhibitors!
Every year this expo attracts exhibitors from the big players to small startups of the space industry who would like to present their ideas to an interested audience. This year was a special for members of space related student groups, because there was a group of booths at the SpaceTechExpo just for us!
Preparation for this event went smoother, because we already participated in 2021 and learned a lot from this. It was especially exciting displaying all of our new hardware protypes we were able to build in the last year. For the first time we had most of the final rocket parts to show to the public and this not only helped us getting more attention from curious persons, but also we got feedback and suggestions from some professionals or colleagues from other student groups.
Directly next to our booth there was the Dutch student group DARE and the Swiss student group ARIS as well presenting their projects. Talking with everybody at the SpaceTechExpo in person with the hardware directly next to us turned out to be very valuable! This lead to new testing opportunities e.g. for the drop test we got support from KST regarding this and from DARE with their wind tunnel.
In the end these three days were tightly packed for us at ASTRA e.V. with booth duty, B2B meetings and talking to other people at their booth. But it was absolutely worth the efforts!