What is Bluesat?
We are a group of over 100 of UNSW Sydney's brightest young minds in space engineering, currently undertaking three major projects, our high-altitude balloon platform, offworld robotics and our satellite tracking ground station. Bluesat started its journey in 1997 as UNSW Sydney's first student project society and has remained active since. We have been supporting all students in the university community to achieve engineering excellence, learn teamwork and grow their confidence.
Our Projects
Offworld Robotics
Bluesat's Offworld Robotics team has earned back-to-back recognition at the Australian Rover Challenge, winning the Best Team Culture Award in 2025 and the Best Development Award in 2026, where we also placed 10th in a highly competitive field. This marks a strong return to competitive robotics following our first entry since 2019 and reflects the rapid progress made across our rover's mechanical, electrical, and software systems. With this foundation, we are pushing towards an even more capable and reliable platform for future competitions.
High Altitude Balloon
Previously funded by NATO to carry a synthetic aperture radar, Bluesat's High-Altitude Balloon launches have successfully returned since the COVID slowdown. In July 2025, the team successfully carried out its first launch, gathering more than 100,000 data points and reaching a peak altitude of 34.1 km during its two-hour and thirty-one-minute flight. Building on this success, the team is getting ready for its second launch in July 2026 with significant upgrades including a cleaner inflation rig and active telemetry. Moving forward, we hope to carry payloads for both our own satellite project and wider research applications.
Groundstation
From 2017 to 2018, Bluesat built and maintained our K17 satellite tracking ground station as support for duration of the UNSW EC0 (QB50-AU02) cubesat mission, maintaining a mission critical data connection. Now, as a part of the development of our portable satellite tracking ground station, our team has repeatedly captured and processed data from NOAA satellites to test our capabilities and improve our members' understanding of the scope of this mission. Moving forwards we seek to extend this ground station's capabilities to maintaining an uplink and downlink connection with our high altitude balloon and later our own cubesat in low Earth orbit.
Satellite
The Satellite project is a partnership with UNSW Rocketry to design and build a scientific research payload for the Australian Universities Rocketry Challenge 2026. Members gain hands-on experience in Cubesat systems, compact electronics, fabrication, and testing while taking a payload from concept to competition-ready hardware.
