Historic student-built rocket aces Europe’s 1st vertical landing test

A group of students from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne in Switzerland performed Europe’s first rocket hop test.

Those who have closely followed the development of Elon Musk and SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and Starship rockets will know that hop tests are key stepping stones for making reusable rockets.

Specifically, they test a prototype rocket’s ability to launch itself off the pad and come back down for a vertical landing.

Impressively, the team of students beat the European Space Agency and Europe’s private space industry to the punch. It is the first group to perform a successful hop test on the continent.

Colibri: Europe’s first successful hopper test vehicle

The student group is called the Gruyère Space Program (GSP). It was founded in 2018 with the goal of developing a 2.5-metre reusable rocket demonstrator called Colibri.

Now, the team has successfully performed a 105-metre free flight with Colibri. The hop test took place on Friday, October 18. During the flight, Colibri took off and flew to an altitude of 105 meters. It then flew 30 meters southeast before returning to the launchpad and performing a successful landing. The flight lasted a total of 60 seconds.

You can watch the entire hop test below.

Colibri features an in-house built bipropellant F-100 rocket engine that produces 1.2 kN of thrust at launch. On its website the, GSP says it developed Colibri for less than 250,000 Swiss Francs ($288,000).

In a nod to its Swiss heritage, GSP strapped a slice of cheese to one of Colibri’s landing legs. We have reached out to the team to determine whether it was turned into fondue due to its proximity to the F-100 rocket plume – as well as some more serious rocket-related questions.

Before the launch, GSP president Jérémy Marciacq stated that the group’s goal was to “demonstrate that students can fly a reusable rocket demonstrator before even private companies or space agencies.”

They did just that. To date, no private company in Europe has performed a successful hop test. Europe’s ArianeGroup aims to perform a hop test for its Themis reusable rocket program. However, the first of those hop tests was recently delayed to 2025.

Last year, PLD Space launched Europe’s first reusable suborbital rocket, called Miura 1. That rocket was not developed for vertical landings, so no hop tests were required. 

Elon Musk’s SpaceX is famously the first company to successfully operate a reusable rocket program with its workhorse Falcon 9 rocket. Falcon 9s are partly reusable and perform vertical landings with their first stage boosters. 

SpaceX’s next-generation Starship rocket, meanwhile, will be fully reusable, meaning both the upper stage and first stage will come back to Earth for a landing. SpaceX recently performed a key test for this method by catching a Super Heay first stage booster out of the sky using its Mechazilla mechanical “chopstick” arms. 

The question with GSP is, where will it go next? The group has already spun off its technology into a startup called PAVE Space. However, as European Spaceflight reports, it will not aim to develop a full-scale reusable rocket.

Instead, PAVE Space will use the Colibri vehicle as part of its “engineering services in mobility” offering. Based in Renens, Switzerland, PAVE Space is looking to provide a space surveillance and tracking service in 2027. It will follow this with a geostationary satellite life extension service by 2030.