Delft Aerospace Rocket Engineering

I had a neighbour, Alberto from Italy who was really into building rockets. After an interest “Borrel” with the committee we both decided to join the student association DARE. At time we joined we with 10 other DARE members started up a project called Stratos. The goal was to build and launch a two stage rocket which could beat the European amateur altitude record. The stratosphere is about 10 km. During flight the rocket will reach Mach 3, thrice the speed of sound or 3500 km/h.  Alberto helping out with designing of the structure, I helped out with some part of the management and electronics. It was nice to apply some other courses to the project, for example I was studying how the nozzle will be affected on a rocket. There are many different factors which comes into play such as ; heat, flow, chemistry and stress. When I finished the implementation of the different physics I put the computer to solve the problem while I was sleeping. When I woke it turned out that the computer had been as lazy as me and not solved anything.

Statos - DARE - Delft Aerospace Rocket Engineering

Statos Logo

I designed a camera to the 3.5 meter long rocket. Being worried about the spinning effect I also designed some algorithms to adjust the spinning motion. Due to airspace limitations in the Netherlands we made it possible for the rocket to instead be launched, for free, from Esrange, Kiruna in Sweden. The launch is scheduled to be around April 2009. Not only is a big project to build the rocket, its engines and electrons but we also have to fix transport the explosives. It’s not really possible to bring that on the plane.

DARE also do a lot of other project for example we were building smaller rockets which were used by the high school project CanSat. The high school students design a can with some electronics and parachute and then its DARE’s mission to launch it up to 1 kilometer and throw it out. Dare is getting more and more proffesional and to read more about their projects feel free to go to their homepage. Link: Delft Aerospace Rocket Engineering.