The Student Aerospace Challenge: a european multidisciplinary contest and tertiary educational programme

Abstract

Inspired by the first successful tests of a private manned spaceplane in 2004, the Student Aerospace Challenge was created in 2006 by the European Astronaut Club and its partners - Dassault Aviation, the European Space Agency, the International Astronautical Federation, Safran and Thales at the time - to allow European university students to explore some aspects of manned suborbital vehicles. Until 2020, the Challenge focused on a local reusable vehicle reaching Mach 3.5 and an altitude of 100 km. Since the 15th edition, to better respond to the evolution of the sector, a second vehicle is proposed: a hypersonic vehicle dedicated to point-to-point transportation taking, for example, less than two hours to travel from Barcelona to Tokyo. Each year, the Steering Committee defines several work packages corresponding to a large variety of study domains realistically related to this type of innovative vehicles like aerodynamic and flight control, structure, reusable propulsion, airworthiness, promotion, market analysis, legal frame & medicine. The introduction of a second vehicle having a quite different mission led the Committee to introduce dedicated topics. In addition, for the current edition, a new work package was proposed to cover potential applications of suborbital flights other than carrying passengers. In function of their background and interest, European University students have the opportunity to work, during several months, on a topic related to one of the work packages and to explore new solutions. Proposed projects should be technically realistic, economically viable and environmentally friendly. Reports and posters issued by student teams are evaluated by the Steering Committee some weeks before the “Suborbital Day”, a dedicated event organised like a mini-symposium, usually on-site where students present orally their projects and meet representatives of the different partners. The best-quoted projects are rewarded with prizes, among them, the ESA Grand Prize offering the winner team the unique opportunity to present their project in an appropriate European space-related event. To date, 216 teams and 998 University students coming from all over Europe already took part in the Student Aerospace Challenge, a motivating and ambitious multidisciplinary educational programme. Their participation allowed them to complement their knowledge, learn new skills and enlarge their network in the space sector