University of Melbourne and CSIRO Win Race2Space LOX Bipropellant Category

A student team from the University of Melbourne has taken first place in the LOX bipropellant category at Race2Space, an international student rocketry competition held in the UK. The winning hardware: a 3D printed, regeneratively cooled liquid rocket engine nicknamed "Slinky."

What the team built

The engine burns liquid oxygen and isopropyl alcohol, producing roughly 5.4 kilonewtons of thrust. It weighs around six kilograms. The team worked with CSIRO's Lab22, Australia's national additive manufacturing innovation centre, to produce the combustion chamber and nozzle using metal 3D printing.

Why this matters

Regeneratively cooled engines are standard in orbital launchers, but they are rarely attempted by student teams. The cooling channels inside the chamber walls carry cold propellant before it enters the combustion zone, keeping the metal from melting. Printing those channels as a single part is exactly the kind of geometry where additive manufacturing wins over conventional machining.

According to CSIRO, this is the first time an Australian student team has won the LOX bipropellant category at Race2Space.

The bigger picture

Student rocketry programs have become a reliable pipeline for aerospace talent, and the skills transfer both ways. Teams get access to production-grade materials and processes, while research labs see how their technology holds up under the pressure of an actual hot-fire test.

The University of Melbourne result shows that desktop and industrial metal printing are now close enough in capability that a well supervised student project can match what used to require a dedicated propulsion lab.