Last year, the team also wanted to compete in the Portuguese competition, but the students encountered major setbacks along the way. ‘Four of our test launches were cancelled due to fires and other incidents at the test locations,’ says UT student Defne Kutsal, who is responsible for the team’s external relations. ‘That made it almost impossible to prepare properly for the competition.’
Paperwork
As if that were not enough, every journey to and from the test locations involves a considerable amount of paperwork. ‘We work with explosive materials, so we need special permits. Even for transporting individual parts to and from a test location,’ explains technical manager and UT student Jeronimo Rojas. He is involved in designing the propulsion system.
‘I think well over half of our work now consists of filling in forms,’ says UT student and team member Ata Özenci. His sub-team is building a completely new rocket, called ENOS, from scratch.
Building bombs
‘The problem is that you could see the product we are building as a bomb that we detonate in a controlled manner,’ adds technical manager Evalds Jēkabs Grava. ‘If one bolt isn’t properly fastened, you basically have a grenade.’ His sub-team focuses on developing a so-called e-hopper, a drone-like vehicle that allows the team to test flight control software and vertical landing algorithms.
Özenci has also noticed that test centres have become less accommodating towards student teams building rockets. ‘There are three locations in the Netherlands, and at least two of them have had a change of management. They are quite strict about the rules. To put it mildly, those rules were not designed with teams like ours in mind.’
Other student teams building rockets are running into the same wall. ‘Even though the work we do could be of great value to European space programmes or the Dutch defence industry.’
Together with other Dutch rocketry teams, RISE is lobbying the government for more lenient rules. In the meantime, Kutsal says the team is also looking at alternatives outside the Netherlands. ‘Germany is nearby, so perhaps we can find a suitable location there.’
Deadlines
The work of the sub-teams will ultimately come together in the ENOS rocket, which the team plans to enter in the EuRoC competition in April 2027. But the first deadline is 1 December, when RISE will test the e-hopper. ‘The thing looks terrible, but the technology behind it is incredibly cool,’ says Grava.
Project Alpha
RISE now has 55 members, making it one of the larger student teams. The team is divided into sub-groups, each focusing on a separate part of the construction process. This allows each sub-team to make progress independently.
The knowledge they acquire separately should ultimately come together in the final goal: Project Alpha, the first student-developed biofuel rocket capable of landing autonomously.
