I know this is not completely new, but on December 3rd, the satellite I worked on was launched into space!
Needless to say this was an incredible experience seeing your own satellite being delivered to space, and the nervous hours of uncertainty if it will deploy correctly and answer our communication. The good news is: It did! We have some minor problems with interference (having a ground station in the middle of a university campus with a lot of other stuff sending and producing electro-magnetic waves is not the best solution), but nothing too serious. We have a confirmed deployment and the satellite is surviving the eclipse behind Earth, so our active ADCS (Attitude Determination and Control System) is working (that is the part I worked on).
To round up this post, here are some pretty pictures
Here the satellite undeployed:

Part of our ADCS team (including me) during testing and summer get-together:

And our amazing poster:

wow amazing! what does the satellite do? (I attempted to answer my own question reading your site)

In the space industry, new technologies are usually verified in precursor missions, before used within expensive projects. Our satellite is built for a similar purpose. We are developing, implementing and verifying a so-called satellite bus, meaning all parts of the satellite required to run the payload. This includes the communication system, the on-board data handling system, the attitude control system, the power supply, the structure and the thermal control system. Besides that, the performance and degradation of a new generation of solar cells, which have never been in outer space before, is investigated by our satellite as its scientific mission.

so the current goal is just to build a working satellite and make sure it works properly, but no current goals outside of "be a satellite"?, I guess that can come later, though)

Awesome project and it was so interesting to follow, although I didn't follow everything. Gives you an idea how much work Space requires, and you didn't even have to worry about launch. Space is truly an engineering wonder

a) congrats @Jan van Brügge

b) did you see that one of the satellites in that launch got ham radio geeks involved to help figure out which one it was? They offered a prize (3D printed logo i think) to the first one who made contact with it on each continent and sent them a specified set of info that'd be useful to help figure out which of the many deployed ones it was.

I would have helped but i just wasn't available and set up for contact at the right time.

Congratulations!

How easy is it to get something into space? I imagine there'a a lot of red tape and planning?

@Dominic We have experimental solar cells on board that are tested for longevity etc. We provide the data to airbus and a few others, because those cells are a good candidate for future space missions

@masukomi no, we just used Satnogs and our own groundstation, as well as a few amateur ham contributions