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> Flying in an air frame with these has several key issues: It won't be a solid test bed for our air frame weight, the centre of gravity will be offset, they aren't throttle-able, even the high specific impulse motors tend to have very short (sub 10 seconds) burn times, they don't generate shock cones, etc. You're reiterating some of the differences between a solid & liquid rocket, but that's not what I'm getting at. If you wait until you have a flight-ready liquid engine (think in years) to test an airframe and other subsystems, those subsystems won't exist. Buy some COTS solid motors and iterate on your subsystem design; the flight experience is invaluable. Any smaller testbeds you fly will not resemble the final airframe, and that's the point. Flying a research liquid engine is risky, you need something cheap to unit test features in your onboard systems---recovery, tracking, DAQ, etc. It sounds like your hardware experience will give you a head start; a lot of amateur rocketeers don't have that. Regardless, please consider starting small and starting now. Getting a small airframe in the air and recovering it successfully with your own avionics is the first hurdle, should be your first short-term goal. I've met several students (and professionals) that jump straight into spaceshot projects and burn out pretty quickly. Some of the replies in this thread are ludicrous (barge launch?). Hypergolics are a bad idea on the hobby level, but others have already touched on that and I think you'll come to the same conclusion on your own. You mention a decrease in engine complexity (in my mind it's small) but you're trading that for a huge jump in infrastructure capability. Lean on the engineering department at your university and recruit some younger guys to help out. It sounds like you're already familiar with the style/structure of other university rocket teams, and that's probably what you should aim for IMO. |