r/KerbalSpaceProgram • u/kspanier • 17h ago
KSP 1 Meta It's been a wild ride
This is gonna be a long one. I'm not claiming that everything solely happened because of this chain of events, but it is one of the threads woven into the fabric of amateur rocketry. There are a lot of reasons for the outcome, this is not the only one, but one of them.
It's early 2013, I just started my bachelor in physics, and loved doing redstone builds in Minecraft. Cubehamster (Dutch physics teacher by profession) is one of the YouTubers I'm following at that time. So he uploads a video series showcasing KSP, but when he uses ion engines in a completely wrong way, immediately starving them of electricity, I'm infuriated. "I could do so much better", I think and buy the game.
Late 2013 I spend so much time playing KSP, my back then partner gets annoyed. "You do know, there's a student rocketry club at our university, you could spend your time building real rockets." I didn't know, but I immediately joined and jumped into their project for a hybrid rocket that had started a few months earlier.
Summer 2015 I'm presenting my bachelor's thesis (completely unrelated to rocketry) at a student conference at DTU in Denmark. We're given a tour of the campus and shown all the different student teams working on projects besides their studies. The student responsible for guiding our group of foreign students is doing her thesis at the university's Space department, which technically is the Danish equivalent of NASA. She shows us her department, and it's completely preoccupied with earth observation and utilisation of space itself. No rocketry to be seen anywhere. I realise, that this university gives way more support to their student groups than my home university, and there should be a massive potential of students theoretically interested in rocketry, but no option to do anything with it.
2016 the hybrid rocket project progressed to run >1 kN cryogenic hybrid engines, and I gain shit tons of knowledge and experience from the program.
Summer/Fall 2016 I applied for an exchange program to do my master's thesis at DTU, and spend the entire second year of my master program there. I would either need to stop doing rocketry for a year ... or not, and found a new rocketry club instead. Again, my thesis is (supposedly) unrelated to rocketry. Turns out, my professor is chairman of Denmark's oldest amateur rocketry club, I didn't know while applying. He of course completely supports my idea of founding a student club. So I first do the obvious and try to also convince the space department ... by walking into the office of the vice president of the de-facto national space agency unannounced and pitching my idea. He was hesitant, to put it mildly. So I resorted to guerilla tactics instead, putting up posters all around campus for a founding event, I prepared in a small conference room. I even got the attention of Copenhagen Suborbitals, and they shared it on their social media.
I had completely underestimated the untapped goldmine I just hit. A room designed for 20 people, where I maybe expected 10, was packed to the brim. People were standing out on the street listening through an open door. As often with volunteer projects, not everyone stayed, but we quickly set up a legal framework to work and officially started Denmark's first student rocketry club, DanSTAR.
We quickly settled on building a liquid rocket engine. Which sounds like a batshit insane thing to do as a student team with precisely zero prior experience. But we had discovered a neat "loophole" in the physics of nitrous oxide, instantly getting rid of a lot of the engineering difficulties typically involved with bi-liquid stuff. So why the heck not?
Summer 2017, my time in Denmark was sadly coming to an end. DanSTAR was doing ok, we established a foothold in university workshops, had the design of our first demonstrator engine, our first sponsor contracts, etc. But this isn't a post on the history of a single rocketry club, so I'll spare you the ups and downs, I wasn't personally involved that much anymore, anyway.
Early 2020, progress on flight hardware is progressing well and is on track for participating at Spaceport America Cup the same year, when COVID happens. It just so happens, that in this short window of time, where events are still happening, but most things already being cancelled, ESA inaugurated a business incubator on campus. So the folks at DanSTAR approach some ESA top brass: "See, we really wanted to launch our liquid rocket in the US this year, but it just got cancelled due to COVID. Isn't there a way we can organise something in Europe instead." "Let me talk to my Portuguese contacts, they've been interested in hosting something like that for a while."
The Portuguese Space Agency was hooked and on board, together with Copenhagen Suborbitals' support, the event hosting student rockets in Europe is taking shape. The European Rocketry Challenge (EUROC) is born.
DanSTAR participated as well, of course, and since barely any other student team dared to properly dabble in bi-liquid propulsion at that point, they were not only able to successfully launch their rockets, but even set up apogee records for student built liquid rockets in the following years. I can't say this with confidence, but the now growing number of student teams building bi-liquids might have been inspired by these successes.
And while I’m on the train on my way home from DanSTAR's 10th birthday party, writing this story, 25 student teams are gathering at a military base in Portugal to launch their own rockets from European soil for the seventh time.
There may be a lot of stories out there like this one. And I'm happy for all of them, from the love for a computer game inspiring those around you, making a change in the world. But this one is mine, and DanSTAR's.
