Education and research hands-on experience on a custom stratospheric platform at the University of Pisa

Since 2018, the Space Systems Laboratory at the University of Pisa has designed, built, and operated stratospheric flight platforms for education and research. More than 40 autonomous missions have been carried out between 2018 and 2025, with students involved in all phases, from subsystem design to flight operations, supporting scientific and technological experiments for academic and industrial partners. Current work focuses on µHAPS, a compact, modular platform capable of carrying up to 15 kg for several days in the stratosphere, equipped with solar panels capable of providing 25 W of power to the payload. The advantages of stratospheric platforms are well known: the possibility to fly to an environment quite similar to space allows for testing of technologies at a fraction of the cost with respect to spacecrafts. While the applications of this platform are various, the focus of this abstract is on its capabilities of working as an economical, fast, and simple to implement way of testing students’ projects. The platform itself has been built with the work carried out on different thesis projects, each one adding a bit of complexity to the whole system, starting from the balloon, the telemetry system, the power system, and the attitude and altitude control systems. Recent flight campaigns have demonstrated two key capabilities of the platform: azimuth stabilization of the payload gondola and long-duration stratospheric flight (three to five days). These features, typically found only in large, costly balloon systems, were achieved through student-led research and development, including an altitude control algorithm based on reinforcement learning. In parallel with its research and commercial use, our platform is used to test systems developed by the students carrying their master thesis projects into the Space System Laboratory. The platform allows students to test subsystems, electronics, and mechanical components in reasonable time with respect to launching them to space, making them gain experience without the need to participate in time-long projects. In this paper, the results and lessons learned from the experiments carried out on these platforms are presented, as well as the insights gained throughout their development. The hope is that these experiences will help guide future improvements and inspire the work of others in similar systems