Student Aerospace Challenge 2024-2025

The 19^th edition of the Student Aerospace Challenge was launched on 4^th October 2024 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 18 years, they have dared interdisciplinary student teams from European universities to work on various aspects of a suborbital crewed vehicle.

For this new edition, two vehicles are proposed:

- a suborbital vehicle for high-speed long-range transport equipped with liquid hydrogen and oxygen rocket engines and able to transport between 10 and 20 regular passengers to a distance greater than 10 000 km (Rome to Los Angeles or Geneva to Singapore, for example) in 1 hour maximum.

- an orbital vehicle servicing low Earth orbit able to accommodate up to seven people, offering a few days in autonomous flight or several months docked to a space station, reusable and compatible with an existing launcher or one currently under development.

So far, the competition has engaged 259 teams representing around 1186 university students.

Each year, partners define several work packages corresponding to domains of study realistically related to this type of innovative vehicles. Depending on their background and interest, student 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 10 Work Packages (WPs). 

WP1 - Applications

WP2 - Promotion / Communication

WP3 - Legal framework

WP4 - Medicine

WP5 - Reusable propulsion / Maintenance

WP6 - Market analysis

WP7 - Mission profile and Concept

WP8 – Design of a low carbon sustainable vehicle

WP9 - Commercial operations

WP10 – Crew preparation and training

Students will have to select a WP and the vehicle family they want to work on. Partners are looking for economically viable and environmentally friendly solutions, as these criteria are becoming more important in aerospace projects, be they commercial endeavours or agency programmes.

Students wishing to participate in the 19^th 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 Form on the Student Aerospace Challenge website before 31^st October 2024. The teams need to justify their WP choice by explaining its consistency with their academic background and experience as well as to provide a cover letter describing their motivation and skills.

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:

• 4^th October 2024: start of application period
• 31^st October 2024: end of application period
• 17^th November 2024: deadline for sending Work Package sheet
• 18^th December 2024: deadline for sending first progress report
• 20^th January 2025: deadline for validation by experts
• 28^th February 2025: deadline for sending second progress report
• 17^th March 2025: deadline for answer by experts
• 27^th March 2025: webinar presenting the "Aerospace Challenge Day"
• 4^th April 2025: deadline for sending a 10-line summary explaining the work done
• 4^th May 2025: deadline for sending final report, poster and bilingual work summary
• 5^th June 2025: Aerospace Challenge Day, a special event bringing together students and partners, ending the 19th edition of the Student Aerospace Challenge

At the end of each edition, student teams are invited to the Aerospace Challenge Day, a special event bringing together the student teams and representatives of the different partners of the Challenge. This year, the participants were welcomed by the French suborbital astronaut Sylvain Chiron, who gave an inspirational talk about his New Shepard Blue Origin flight in May 2024.

During this closing event, the students present their work and the best-quoted projects are rewarded with prizes, among them the “ESA Grand Prix”. This prize offers the best student team the unique opportunity to present their project to space professionals in an appropriate space-related event in Europe. The winners of the 18^th edition were the SARM team from Technical University of Madrid (UPM), who selected the Mission Profile and Concept work package. The team was composed of 4 students who worked on the Phase-0 design of an autonomous and reusable space module.

The team will attend the 74^th International Astronautical Congress at in Milan (Italy).  Through the participation of ESA in the International Student Education Board (ISEB), they will join the ISEB Student Programme with 73 other university students from all over the world and present their project to the space community at the ESA booth.

Interested in applying? Fill in the application form with your team. For more information, check the Student Aerospace Challenge website.