Inside the Stellar Alpina Reveal Event

On 29 May 2026, Stellar Alpina opened its doors at Switzerland Innovation Park Zurich.

The goal was simple: share the founding story, reveal the company’s first engine, and bring together the people shaping the next chapter of space in Switzerland and Europe.

More than 230 guests joined the evening. Founders, engineers, investors, students, industrial partners, public figures, friends, and members of the wider space ecosystem gathered around one thing: hardware that had moved from ambition into reality.

More than a company reveal

Some startups begin with a slide deck. Stellar Alpina began with a hotfire.

The Reveal Event was designed around that difference. It was not only a brand launch, a networking evening, or a formal announcement. It was a moment to show the work behind the company: the engine, the test campaign, the founding team, and the ecosystem forming around them.

Stellar Alpina was founded in February 2026 by ARIS alumni who had already spent years building, testing, failing, and learning through student rocketry. By the time the company opened its doors, it had already completed its first successful hotfire campaign with Engine 0, a rotating detonation rocket engine.

That made the evening feel different. The vision was not abstract. It had physical weight.

Hardware in the room

At the centre of the event was the first engine.

For Stellar Alpina, revealing hardware matters because it changes the conversation. Space companies can often sound distant, speculative, or years away from reality. A tested engine does the opposite. It makes the work tangible.

Guests could see the direction of the company: detonation-based propulsion for the next era of in-space mobility. Not only a single component, but the first step toward a broader architecture of engines, vehicles, and lunar delivery systems.

The reveal showed that serious upstream space hardware is being built in Zurich — not as a metaphor, but as metal, infrastructure, testing, data, and iteration.

Building Switzerland’s place in space

The evening also featured a panel on Switzerland’s role in the future of space with Thomas Süssli, Stefan Brupbacher, and Florian Kehl.

Together, the discussion moved beyond the company itself. It asked a larger question: how can Switzerland turn research excellence, industrial strength, and entrepreneurial speed into real space capability?

The answer will require more than ambition alone. It will require industrial depth, advanced manufacturing, testing infrastructure, patient capital, institutional awareness, and ecosystems where these elements can meet.

That is what made the setting meaningful. Switzerland Innovation Park Zurich is not only where Stellar Alpina is based. It is part of the environment that makes this kind of company possible.

From ARIS to upstream space hardware

Stellar Alpina’s story is closely connected to ARIS, the Academic Spaceflight Initiative Switzerland. ARIS gave the founders a place to build serious hardware before founding a company. It gave them responsibility early, exposed them to pressure, and created the shared engineering culture that now carries into Stellar Alpina.

The Reveal Event made that transition visible.

What began as student rocketry has become a commercial space venture focused on high-performance propulsion and in-space mobility. The same mindset remains: build, test, learn, and keep moving.

A new chapter

The evening marked a beginning, not a finish line.

The hotfire campaign, the engine reveal, and the pre-seed round gave Stellar Alpina early momentum. But the company’s larger ambition remains ahead: to build a new class of propulsion and mobility infrastructure from Europe, with Switzerland as a serious base for upstream space hardware.

A huge thank you to everyone who joined, supported, challenged, photographed, invested, advised, and believed in what is being built.

This was not just an event.

It was the beginning of a new chapter.

Onwards.