Who we are and what we do:
We, the people of Structures at ASTRA e.V., focus on supporting all the teams for manufacturing equipments required for propulsion, integration and aesthetics of the rocket.
We mainly work on producing a pressure vessel which can sustain high pressures for longer duration of time. We use carbon fibre winding and laminating methods to fabricate such parts.
We will still continue to manufacture such tanks in the near future and we are always on the look out for passionate engineers who can help us master the art of manufacturing pressure vessels.
For Project Sirius we asked our Oxidizer tank “How much pressure can you handle?” and It said, “Yes!”
So, we did a pressure test of 90 Bar on our carbon fibre reinforced oxidizer tank and it survived for more than 60 minutes! This result was achieved after the Hot Fire test campaign of the KARMA rocket at DLR Lampoldshausen.
A few ASTRAnauts introduce themselves
Moin!
My name is Shreya and I am part of the structures team of ASTRA and currently enrolled at Universität Bremen in Space Engineering Masters.
In my free time, I really enjoy cooking and reading books. Additionally, I am really interested in research about the sustainable development in space industry and growth of additive manufacturing in aerospace sector.
I joined ASTRA because of Project Sirius and its challenges that will need to be faced in a team gained my interest. ASTRA is a good opportunity to implement practical work into the theoretical studies. Especially, the Structures team is continuously working on optimization of the current oxidizer tank.
Hi I’m Patrick!
I’m 43 years of age and I have been with ASTRA e.V. for about half a year. But what is ASTRA and why I joined? And how can I positively enrich the project?
Let me start with my studies: I study Computer Science at the HSB and I found out about ASTRA from a fellow student. Later that day I browsed a bit through the net and remembered the conversation in the morning. So I entered „ASTRA“ and – after entered „ASTRA e.V.“, because the other search query gives a lot of pages of a beer-brand – from that particular moment I was totally hyped about the project.
A lot of wonderful and intelligent young students from all over the world and from every discipline are working together to reach an ambitious goal and to bring in their own mix of talents and positive characteristics (to answer the other question at the beginning: in my case it was a knowlege about carbon fibres and how to handle them).
Now, I work as a structures engineer in the structures department and so I can help to design, manufacture and mount all sorts of rocket-parts.
Could there be anything nicer for a nerd?
If you find this project as intriguing as we do, join our team by clicking on the button below.