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A bit of info about our engine Helios: It was a project started in 2017 that marked the formation of the MIT Liquid Propulsion team. The (like three) members back then wanted to just try what they could to design the simplest engine they could, so they landed on an incredibly simple steel pressure-fed heat-sink LOX-Ethanol engine with impinging jet injectors. It's essentially a cylindrical block of 1018C steel with a nozzle profile cut out. What they didn't realize at the time was that liquid oxygen is a BITCH to acquire and even a bigger bitch to test with, since we were just undergrads who don't know shit about anything in life. Because of this, it took us 7 years of testing, feed system work, logistics, and building relationships with actual engineers to actually fire it without killing ourselves. If you know anything about rocket engines, that's why our test stand looks like a paper mache project and why the engine itself sustains about half a second of proper thrust before the throat just melts and spews molten steel everywhere. I was very lucky to see it fire like a week before I graduated lol, because otherwise the project would have been scrapped in favor of an actual flight-ready engine :)

Nowadays, the team continues to operate under the MIT Rocket Team, and designs flight-ready engines.

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