The Gruyere Space Program was organized by college students but is not affiliated with any university.
Sixty-seven years after the Soviets launched Sputnik into space, humans back on Earth are craning their necks again at the October sky thanks to a whole new class of rocketeers—college students, not state-backed professionals.
These amateur engineers are redefining what is possible for students and are a leading indicator of a new era of space, in which rocketry is no longer the reserve of well-funded, well-staffed operations, and is widely accessible to people who have mastered foundational mathematics, engineering and physics.
In October, the University of Southern California’s (USC) Rocket Propulsion Lab launched its small Aftershock II rocket to an altitude of 470,000 ft.—well past the boundary of space. Lofted from the Black Rock Desert rocket launch area in Nevada, the Aftershock II’s flight was the highest a nongovernment or noncommercial rocket has ever flown, according to the USC Viterbi School of Engineering.
Across the Atlantic, nestled in a Swiss valley, the Gruyere Space Program successfully landed its Colibri reusable hopper rocket for the 53rd time since May. On that October launch, the hopper rocket reached a peak of 105 m (344 ft.), diverted 30 m north and landed 63 sec. later on its pad. The student-run Gruyere Space Program is not affiliated with any university but was started by co-founders who went to high school together.
A decade or two ago, these feats would have been unheard of by college students. Some professional space companies would have struggled to execute on the budgets and timeframes of these novices. To be sure, college students have been launching cubesats as rideshares into space for decades, but advanced rocketry has generally been left to the professionals.
The success of these two student-run rocketry clubs shows how rocket-building know-how has drastically expanded in recent years. The clubs attribute this dissemination of knowledge to several factors.
For starters, the amateurs are more professional about their engineering process. USC Rocket Propulsion Lab members have learned to rigorously document and coordinate their development across different graduating classes, leading to an accumulation of knowledge beyond their typical four-year undergraduate schooling, for example.
“They largely figured it out on their own,” says Dan Erwin, a professor at USC who serves as chair of the Department of Astronautical Engineering and an advisor to the rocket club. “Part of the impetus came from making a series of avoidable mistakes like forgetting a key step in a manufacturing process or losing a design because it was stored only on a graduating senior’s laptop.”
The students are also not shy about asking the professionals for help. USC’s Rocket Propulsion Lab has amassed a large alumni network of space industry workers who provide input. The Gruyere Space Program built up its own network of industry partners, including Switzerland’s up-and-coming Swissto12, a developer of small geostationary satellites.
While these student-run programs have enormous ambitions, their approach is piecemeal and practical. Like much of the startup space industry, these rocket clubs have adopted an incremental, minimally viable product engineering approach to their work.
“We didn’t try a super fancy algorithm or anything,” Gruyere Space Program co-founder and President Jeremy Marciacq says. “We just did the bare minimum, just to see if it could fly. When we saw that something was not enough, we just enhanced it a bit. And then if it was enough to fly, it would fly like this.”
Lastly, if you know where to look, the internet can provide a DIY rocket-building curriculum. For instance, the Gruyere Space Program students developed their hopper rocket by taking their fundamental knowledge of mathematics and pairing it with practical how-tos online, including on YouTube.
The achievements of these rocket clubs is a positive sign for the U.S. and European space sectors, as it indicates future employees will have a rolling start when they enter the workforce. Furthermore, hands-on college experience might allow students to bypass working at big traditional primes and space agencies; reservoirs of institutional knowledge that too often hamstring young professionals’ development via slow-moving systems of seniority, credentialism and bureaucracy.
Instead of laboring away their twenties engineering an obscure part within an obscure program, as just another cog in the wheel of a big organization, the next generation of college graduates may be able to launch their space startups as soon as they get their diplomas, perhaps the next SpaceX will even be launched from a college dorm room.
Indeed, some of the Gruyere Space Program’s members have just founded Pave Space, a startup aiming to develop satellite guidance, navigation and control, as well as spacecraft propulsion. The USC Rocket Propulsion Lab plans to become the first university space program to regularly develop and launch experimental payloads into space via rockets on suborbital trajectories.
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