Projects Delft Aerospace Rocket Engineering
01 Jul 2008
Delft Aerospace Rocket Engineering, or “DARE” in short, is a society of enthusiastic students from Delft University of Technology who design, build and launch experimental rockets.
Stratos
The Stratos project is the most extreme short-term project by DARE. The rocket will travel at almost twice the speed of sound to an altitude in excess of more than 8 kilometres! We are aiming to launch the rocket in the second half of 2008 at Esrange in Sweden. We are very thankful to the Swedish Space Corporation to provide us with a launch opportunity.
The Stratos rocket will consist of two stages. First, there is an expendable drop-off booster which will propel the rocket close to the speed of sound. The booster will de-attach after burnout and the main stage of about 15 kNs will start. After some coast time, the rocket will reach its apogee of about 8 kilometres. A large part of the rocket will not be recovered, but all the valuable data, electronics and payload experiments will be jettonised and safely landed by parachute. The flight computers will also have a wireless data downlink for telemetry, ensuring complete evaluation of the flight, even if the electronics capsule is not found.
This project will further develop DARE into a leading student rocketry group in Europe, enlarging our expertise in: logistical operations, supersonic flight, staging, clustering, high altitude operation and composite construction.
The flight of Stratos will mean a big step in a growing desire of “envelope expansion” within DARE. Ultimately, Stratos will pave the way to even bigger rockets like Phobos and Ares.
The Cansat Launcher
The CanSat Launcher is a rocket designed to launch CanSats for the Dutch Cansat Competition. Several versions of the rocket have been made. The CanSat Launcher version 4 has been launched succesfully for three times for the pilot of the CanSat Competition in 2007. For the CanSat Competition of 2008, DARE is making some improvements on the already successful CanSat Launcher version 4. The new rocket is simply called the CanSat Launcher version 5.
Read more : http://www.dare.lr.tudelft.nl/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=18&Itemid=20