The space industry is often seen at its largest scale: SpaceX launches, new vehicles, crowded launch schedules, and missions measured in millions of dollars. At UCL’s MechSpace in King’s Cross, the budgets are smaller, but the engineering principles are the same. Students are designing rockets, developing propulsion systems, and working through many of the same engineering problems that define spaceflight.
UCL Rocket formed in 2021 and now has more than 35 students working across three divisions. Team Director Rosalind Munasinghe oversees a program that ranges from rockets for the UK’s National Rocketry Championship to larger international projects and a separate liquid propulsion team. The students have already competed in the US, including a fourth place finish out of 65 teams at Spaceport America Cup in 2023.
This year’s flagship rocket is Conquest. The team’s longer-term aim is to combine its experience building rockets with the liquid engines it has been developing separately, then work toward a student-built liquid rocket capable of reaching the Kármán line (a hypothetical line 100km above sea level recognized as being the point at which object reach space). That goal involves more than propulsion. The rocket team has also been developing its first flight computer, including the logic needed to control recovery safely and at the right point in flight.
Before the summer competition season, Relm visited UCL’s MechSpace to catch up with the teams as they prepared for the months ahead. The film follows UCL Rocket as work continued on Conquest, its flight electronics, and liquid propulsion program, and also visits UCL Rover as the team developed the autonomous systems it hoped to take to competition in Poland.
The liquid engine program shows how quickly the engineering can move from one year to the next. In 2025, UCL Rocket tested its first regeneratively cooled liquid engine at Race to Space. It used nitrous oxide and isopropyl alcohol, produced around 5 kilonewtons of thrust, and recorded a specific impulse of roughly 200 seconds. The team finished fourth in its category.
“We pour hours and hours into this project and then it all comes down to a singular launch,” says Rosalind Munasinghe, UCL Rocket’s Team Director.
For 2026, the students changed the engine rather than making a larger, higher thrust copy of the old one. They moved from nitrous oxide to liquid oxygen while keeping isopropyl alcohol as the fuel. Their target increased to 7 kilonewtons of thrust, with a projected specific impulse of around 250 to 260 seconds.
The material changed too. The previous engine was printed from an aluminum alloy. This year, the injector and main engine component were printed from copper chromium zirconium. Manufacturing had limited the size of the previous design, so the team also extended the ‘characteristic’ (not total) chamber length to 1 meter.
Inside the injector are 30 coaxial swirl elements for the fuel and another 30 for the oxidiser. Their job is to bring the two propellants together inside the combustion chamber in a controlled way. The engine is regeneratively cooled, which means propellant passes through channels around the chamber before combustion and takes heat away from the walls.
None of those choices can be treated in isolation. More performance means dealing with more heat. Cooling has to remain even around the chamber, and the injector has to behave as the team expects. A local hot spot, caused by cooling channels clogging from powder used to make the engine, can damage an engine even when the rest of the design is sound.
The students designed margin into the hardware. “We are operating with a very conservative safety factor of like four or something like that, which is the minimum at the throat in our case,” says Sam Owen, a third-year mechanical engineering student who leads the liquid engine team. “Hopefully it doesn’t blow up.”
Relm supports both UCL Rocket and UCL Rover financially, helping the teams stretch student budgets across ambitious engineering programs. We also brought in Professor Adam Baker, a propulsion specialist with 30 years of space industry experience, to spend time with the students and ask technical questions about the work.
Baker’s conversations with the team covered the things that matter once a design leaves the screen: manufacturing limits, injector behavior, cooling, safety margins, test access, and what it would take to put a liquid engine into flight. The students manage and deliver the engineering while Relm merely provides support and helps show their work a wider audience.
Testing remains one of the harder parts of the liquid engine program. UCL can’t fire an engine of this type on campus in the middle of London, so the team depends on specialist facilities. Components for the 2026 engine were 3D printed by a manufacturing sponsor in Germany, shipped back to the team for assembly, and prepared for testing at Westcott in Buckinghamshire.
When calculations met hardware, the engine fired twice, and the team saw evidence of how the engine behaved under real test conditions.
That evidence, coming from the ability to design, build, test, learn , redesign and then test again, iterating each time, is the point of the exercise. The 2026 engine itself came from what UCL Rocket learned in 2025. The team changed the propellant, material, chamber geometry, injector design, and performance target because it had a previous engine to learn from.
The next step is already taking shape. UCL Rocket has begun work on a smaller regeneratively cooled flight engine, targeting around 1 to 2 kilonewtons of thrust and using a self-pressurized nitrous oxide feed system. The aim is to package it inside an actual rocket and begin joining the propulsion work with the team’s experience designing and flying vehicles.
“A longer-term ambition for the team would be to unite our liquid propulsion division with the flagship rocket building and produce then fly UCL Rocket’s first ever liquid rocket,” says Munasinghe.
That will bring a different set of problems. An engine on a test stand only has to be an engine. A flight system has to carry its propellant, control it, fit inside an airframe, work with the rest of the vehicle, and do all of it reliably enough to leave the ground.
For Relm, that is where resilience becomes practical. New technology earns confidence when it is tested against the conditions it was built for, and when the result feeds back into the next design. UCL Rocket now has two more firings to learn from, and another engine to build.
