European Rocketry Challenge 2021
Dec 22, 2021
Right after the BEXUS campaign in Sweden I had opportunity to attend a rocketry competition with another team in my Science Club.
SimLE SimBa is a rocketry program on my university that builds hybrid motor rockets for the purpose of launching in rocketry competitions like Spaceport America Cup. Sadly, we missed the opportunity to launch in SAC in 2020 and 2021. Since then a new rocketry competition has popped up in Portugal. It’s called European Rocketry Challenge and has basically the same rules as the USA counterpart.
The aim of the competition is to get as many points as possible. The points are given for the construction, safety, operations and the final parameters of the flight. There are different categories for different rocket motor types (liquid, solid, hybrid) and flight altitudes (3km / 10k feet or 9km). It is not about going as high as possible - rather aiming for particular altitude. There are different approaches to achieve so, and there are variety of implementations from different teams.
The competition took place October 11-16th 2021 in Ponte de Sor, Portugal. 21 university teams from all over Europe have attended, including 3 teams from Poland.
Each team has been working on assembling their rockets which shipped disassembled from their universities. The launches took place from a nearby military site. Each team had to go through the entire process themselves during which the teamwork and technical aspects were graded.
Although the rocketry department is not my main line of work within the Club, I was able to help the electronics team solve issues with the flight computer. At least I hope it worked :P
Needles to say it was a really exhausting experience. It was the first time the team worked so far outside of their workshop. As if the construction of a rocket wasn’t complex enough, we had to work in hot Portuguese sun and following the organizers rules and limitations.
In the end our rocket has lifted off on October 16th around 3pm. We aimed at 3km altitude, but due to technical problems the rocket only flew 617 meters. We didn’t win anything, but we came back very much experienced.
Next goal of the team is to launch in next years Spaceport America Cup. Hopefully I can make it too!