Our Rockets Run on Paraffin. Yes, Like Candles

Christian Schmierer, an aerospace engineer who grew up next to Europe's largest rocket test center, co-founded HyImpulse in 2018. When every expert dismissed hybrid rockets as failed technology from the 1960s, his team did the unthinkable: they built rockets powered by paraffin—essentially candle wax.Today, HyImpulse has raised over €45 million and became Germany's first privately-funded company to successfully launch a rocket—spending just €15 million to get there while competitors burned through ten times that amount.In this episode, Christian shares the unfiltered journey of building Europe's most unconventional launch company: how breaking world records as students made founding a company feel inevitable, why four engineers leaving stable jobs at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) turned out to be the right choice and why they had to ship their rocket halfway around the world to the Australian desert for a mission aptly named "Light This Candle.-----------------------------------------------Chapters:(00:00) Introduction(02:50) From Childhood Curiosity to Student Rocket Team(09:55) Why Hybrid Rockets? The Technology No One Believed In(14:32) Failure at 2 Kilometers: Our First Launch Attempt(22:49) Breaking the World Record: 32.3 Kilometers(24:04) The 16-Month Gap: From Students to Founders(31:23) How We Landed Our First Investor(35:37) Scaling from 4 Founders to 50 People(42:33) Cracking the Code: Winning EU Funding on the Third Try(48:25) Light This Candle: Germany's First Private Rocket Launch(51:21) How One Launch Changed Everything with Investors(53:05) Raising €45M and Planning the Orbital Rocket(58:21) The 10-Year Vision(01:05:03) Advice to Space Founders-----------------------------------------------Takeaways:1) Just get started - Europe rewards those who try: "If you have a great idea then there is definitely room in Europe to do this and follow your dream or your idea and you just have to get started because initially there will be people who say it's impossible or no one needs it." 2) Learn to speak different languages to different stakeholders: "The way how I explain it to a potential investor is completely different whether it's a VC or a strategic, but then if I have to explain it to an authority it's again completely different - I have to use a different language that they understand." Your pitch to a VC, a government agency, and a customer should sound completely different.3) Capital efficiency is a competitive advantage, not a limitation: HyImpulse launched their first rocket for just €15 million total. "We are actually very capital efficient but of course if you want to build amazing things, big things, then it also requires capital." Being scrappy forces you to make smarter decisions.4) Start where you have the edge, not where VCs tell you to start: While other rocket startups bought hired experienced engineers, HyImpulse started with basic research on hybrid rockets with paraffin. "We had to start with basic research whereas everyone else, if they wanted, they could have bought an engine."5) Resilience built in student days becomes the foundation for your company: As students, their first rocket failed at just 2 kilometers after years of work. They built two more rockets and broke the world record at 32.3 kilometers on their third attempt. That "fail, learn, try again" DNA carried directly into HyImpulse - where the stakes were exponentially higher but the resilience was already battle-tested.6) A successful launch changes everything - but only for non-engineers: "For us as rocket engineers, already in the testing phase on ground it was clear okay this will work at some point. But for non-engineers this is a different story. I can explain to people as many times 'yeah with candle wax, with paraffin you can launch into space' and people say 'yeah okay.' But with that launch, that of course changed - people say 'oh it looks like a real rocket!'"