Delft Aerospace Rocket Engineering, better known as DARE, is a amateur rocket organisation of enthusiastic students at Delft University of Technology. The goal of DARE is to design, build and launch amateur rockets and to give students the opportunity to apply the knowledge obtained during their study by building rockets, thus giving members hands-on experience with space projects.

At the moment, DARE has around 100 members and has launched over 60 rockets since its founding in 2001, from small, first-year rockets to bigger, more advanced rockets. In 2009, DARE broke the European amateur altitude record with the rocket Stratos, which was launched in Kiruna and reached an altitude of 12.5 km.

DARE also provides the rockets for the yearly Dutch CanSat competition, organised by TU Delft and ISIS. In this competition, teams of high school students design a satellite that will be launched to an altitude of 1km. Apart from building rockets, also research about rocket motors is performed, both solid as liquid and hybrid.

DARE, rocket science the student way.

Past news items:

Last Tuesday, during the Openings Week (OWee), the TU Delft DreamTeams were promoted to the freshmen students in the Stevinhal. During this so called 'Sustainability Event', all the different teams showed the new students their workshops and the projects they are working on right now to make them enthusiastic for the DreamTeam projects.

Of course DARE was also present to promote their activities and the members of the current and upcoming DARE boards did their best to explain the groups of students what we as DARE do and how or organization works. To make it more interesting the freshmen students were allowed to vote for the coolest DreamTeam by filling in their choice on a voting ballot. And apparently our promotion was successful, as at the end of the day it was announced to us that DARE was elected as coolest DreamTeam!

The presentation of this victory was held in the OWee tent on Wednesday afternoon when members of all DreamTeams were called on stage and the winner was announced. In front of an enormous festival tent, filled completely with new students to the TU, we had the chance to speak a few words to all those students to explain what DARE is and what we do. This event has brought DARE under the attention of a lot of people and this event was a great start for hopefully a great new academic year for DARE on the TU Delft.

Coming Friday there will be another launch day of DARE. The annual CanSat competition organized by the Delft company ISIS will take place. Eighteen groups of high school students have worked this year on building electronics inside a little can to make a miniature satellite. As always DARE provides the rockets that launch the CanSats to an altitude of one kilometer. The CanSats will be launched with a CanSat Launcher V6. Each of these enormous rockets is 4 meters long and 20cm in diameter. Each rocket can carry up to six CanSats so three of these rockets will fly to take all CanSats up.

Next to the three CanSat launchers DARE will launch 3 other rockets, including the Concept launcher of the Stratos II project. Futhermore two high school students will fly their rocket using a rocket motor from DARE. And also the NAVRO has one rocket on the schedule.

Last year the CanSat launch day in June was unfortunately cancelled due to predicted thunderstorms. We hope that this year the weather will permit us to launch the CanSats. At the moment the weather prediction tells us that we can expect some rain on Friday but hopefully no thunder.

The DARE launch day of last Friday was a stunning success. All rockets made by DARE lifted of beautifully and performed a very good flight.

The five SRP rockets, each carrying an egg, were launched up high and two of them succeeded in bringing the egg back safely. One of these had a perfect deployment of its parachute very close on the highest point of flight. The other did not deploy its parachute but came down in an unusual sideways descend instead of the usual nose down dive.

Their was also a rocket launch of an experimental rocket motor of the solid propellant group. The motor worked fine and produced a clear flame out of the back of the motor and propelled the rocket to great heights. The rocket is also filmed with our high speed camera, see the video included here.

The French organization Octave also had the chance to launch their rocket with a rocket motor provided with DARE. Although their rocket eventually needed to fly on the backup electrical system the separation and parachute deployments worked very well and the rocket was recovered intact. Hopefully this launch marks the start of further good relations between DARE and Octave.

And of course there was the launch of the Stratos II Concept Launcher. This first major step on the Stratos II project worked like a charm. It succesfully left the launch tower and just after reaching its highest point the nosecone and the motor module separated and the parachute deployed successfully. For more info and footage go to http://projectstratos.nl/

The high speed footage of five of the rockets. The first is the SRP 31: Nutcase, second is the DAVE of the French organization Octave, third is a rocket by the Navro called 'The Lost Shadow', fourth is the Stratos II Concept Launcher and the fifth rocket is the Fulgor (aka El Tigre or The Tiger) with an experimental rocket motor.