The wider Sunride team includes over 80 members, ranging from first-year undergraduates to PhD students. The overall goal of the project is to make space engineering more accessible to students in the UK. They are also aiming to become the first UK student-led team to launch beyond the Kármán line, which borders Earth's atmosphere 62 miles above sea level. The team already holds the UK altitude record for an amateur rocket, which they achieved in 2019.
The visit to Parliament came about when Dr John met Mark Garnier at an ADS event promoting the UK Youth Rocketry Challenge (UKROC) earlier this year. We are supporting UKROC as part of our University of Sheffield Race to Space initiative.
Race to Space is a national education initiative to boost the UK space sector. It aims to provide students with a practical educational experience solving real-world, complex engineering problems through hands-on experience designing, manufacturing and testing rocket engines. Ultimately, this will provide the UK space sector with the better trained, better-prepared, more diverse graduates and future engineering and space talent in the UK that it needs to continue its ambitious growth.
Part of the Race to Space initiative involves a national propulsion competition where student teams hot fire liquid/hybrid rocket engines. Last year the Sunride team hot fired the first student-built 3D printed liquid rocket engine in the UK. This year the Race to Space competition is running again with 17 universities from across the UK signed up.
Tom Danvers, a 3rd Year Aerospace student and Sunride student lead, said of the visit: “It was great to meet Mark Garnier and have the opportunity to discuss the Race to Space competition, our work on Project Sunride and to show him the video of the Karman Alpha launch. We hope that this is the beginning of a good connection with Mark so that The University of Sheffield’s initiatives are front-of-mind when considering space education in the UK. He also gave up more of his time to give us a personal tour of Parliament, which we all found really interesting.”
Dr Alistair John, Director of Curriculum Strategy for Aerospace Engineering at the University of Sheffield, added: “The aim of the Space APPG is to raise awareness in Parliament of the importance and opportunities of space based capabilities to the UK economy, policy making, society and the space community. This aligns closely with the aims of our space initiatives here at Sheffield”
“Project Sunride is one of the top rocket teams in the UK, with lots of exciting plans in the pipeline. It was great to speak to Mark about the fantastic work our students are doing and the success of the Race to Space initiative, both of which are really helping to put Sheffield on the map in the UK space sector.”
“We are looking forward to heading back to Parliament again in Spring for the next ADS/APPG event which will be focusing on Future Technology & Sustainability in relation to Space.”