Concordia students make history with Starsailor rocket launch

Concordia students have made history by successfully launching a rocket from a remote site in northern Quebec. It marks a significant achievement as the project is the culmination of seven years of making.

The president of student group Space Concordia, Simon Randy, said, “We’re trying to prove that students can also do hard things.”

He further explained, “It’s not just companies or large government organizations. It’s really people who have the drive and the grift to work on these large projects.”

Starsailor is a 13-meter liquid-fuel rocket which was about to take off after 5:30 am, but the launch didn't go exactly as planned.

According to Randy, the rocket split into pieces shortly after taking off and did not reach space. Our prime goal was to launch a rocket into space, and have it fall back to Earth with a parachute so that the students could recover it.

Apart from it, Randy still calls the project a success. He said, “We cleared the launch tower. We had a stable flight, and our telemetry worked normally, we’ve learned a huge amount with this mission.”

According to Randy view, the prime motive of this mission was space launch from Canadian soil in more than 25 years. Starsailor was the largest building rocket ever to fly.

While Randy said, “We wanted to show the world that space can still be exciting even in a country we are maybe not focused on.”

Primarily, the project initiated in 2018 as a part of a U.S. based competition that offered $1 million for a student-led university team that launched a liquid-fuel rocket into space. It was a challenging move as it suddenly got derailed during the COVID-19 pandemic

Randy attended Concordia three years ago to particularly join the rocketry club, and he spent more time exploring Starsailor than in school.

He added, “It’s like your entire existence is devoted to this project.”

Teams have been recovering some of the wreckage from the rocket before heading back to Montreal. This launch took place about 250 kilometers north of the Cree community of Mistissini.

Several community members have visited the launch site, and more than 700 Concordia students have contributed to the Starsailor program which was started seven years ago.

In addition, Randy said, “It’s like every day you come, and a rocket is there .... It's kind of like a person in the room and there’s always someone working on it.”

“And now it's gone,” he further added.