Student Aerospace Challenge 2022-2023
The Astronaute Club Européen (ACE) and its industrial and institutional partners are inviting university students from all ESA Member States to participate in the Student Aerospace Challenge 2022-2023.
The 17th edition of the Student Aerospace Challenge was launched on 26th October 2022 by partners from the aerospace sector including Astronaute Club Européen (ACE), ArianeGroup, Dassault Aviation, ESA and Le Bourget Air and Space Museum. For the past 16 years, they have dared tertiary education student teams to work on various aspects of a suborbital crewed vehicle. Two vehicles are proposed: a local reusable vehicle that will reach Mach 3.5 and 100 km of altitude, similar to Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo, or a hypersonic vehicle dedicated to point-to-point transportation (taking less than two hours to travel from Paris to Tokyo, for example). So far, the competition has engaged 229 teams representing around 1059 university students.
Each year, the partners define several work packages corresponding to domains of study realistically related to this type of innovative vehicles. Depending on their background and interest, students teams have the opportunity to work on a topic related to one of the work packages and to explore new solutions.
For this new edition, students can choose between the following 13 different Work Packages (WPs).
WP2 - Promotion / Communication
WP5 - Reusable propulsion / Maintenance
WP6 - Suborbital flight history
WP8 - Structure suited to suborbital flight
WP9 - Aerodynamic and Flight Control
WP11 - Mission profile and Concept
WP12 – Design of a low carbon sustainable suborbital vehicle
Some of the proposed WPs will only be applicable for one type of vehicle. For other WPs, the students will have to select the vehicle family they want to work on. Partners are looking for economically viable and environmentally friendly solutions as these criteria are becoming more and more important in aerospace projects whether they are commercial endeavours or agency programmes.
Students wishing to participate in the 17th edition of this Challenge should form a team of 2 to 5 students, get familiar with the application process, obtain the oral authorisation to participate from an official member of their university and apply through the Application section of the Student Aerospace Challenge website before 11th November 2022. The team need to justify their WP choice by explaining its consistency with their academic background and experience as well as provide a cover letter describing their motivation and skills.
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Each application will be studied by the Organization Committee of the Challenge. The team’s ability to work efficiently on the selected work package, the specificities of their institution and the arguments put forward in their motivation letter will be particularly important to the Committee. If the team is selected, the application will have to be officially validated by a representative of the team's institution and the students will be asked to follow the Challenge working instructions and schedule:
- 26th October 2022: beginning of application period
- 11th November 2022: end of application period
- 25th November 2022: deadline for sending Work Package sheet
- 16th December 2022: deadline for sending first progress report
- 17th January 2023: deadline for validation by Experts
- 28th February 2023: deadline for sending second progress report
- 2nd April 2023: deadline for sending a 10-line summary explaining the work done
- 5th May 2023: deadline for sending final report, poster and bilingual work summary
- 8th June 2023: « The Suborbital Day »
At the end of each edition, the student teams are invited to the « The Suborbital Day », a special event, gathering the student teams and representatives of the different partners of the Challenge. This year the participants were welcomed by Matthias Mauer from theBerlin Air Show 2022.
During this closure event, the students present their work and the best-quotedprojects are rewarded with prizes, among them the “ESA Grand Prix”. This prize offers to the best student team the unique opportunity to present its project to space professionals in an appropriate space-related event in Europe. The winners of the 16th edition were the ICSpace Team from Imperial College London (UK) who selected the WP9 - Aerodynamics and Flight Control. The team composed of 5 students studied and developed a suborbital vehicle by making use of the Busemann Biplane to greatly improve aerodynamic performance in supersonic conditions while being feasible to fly safely in subsonic conditions.
The team got the opportunity to attend the International Astronautical Congress 2022 (IAC) as ESA-sponsored students for the International Space Education Board’s (ISEB) Student Program and present their project in the International Student Zone.
Interested in applying? Fill in the application form with your team!
For more information check the Student Aerospace Challenge website.