The Student Aerospace Challenge was born in 2006 from the desire of companies in the aerospace sector and student associations to strengthen their links by carrying out a highly innovative federative project.

The initial choice was to study a manned suborbital vehicle that could be reused, for local flights, reaching an altitude of 100 km, the frontier of space, and assoiciated missions. This vehicle is no longer proposed for the 19^th exercise. From the 15^th exercise, the possibility of working on a manned suborbital vehicle, capable of point-to-point hypersonic transportation (taking less than one hour to travel from Paris to Tokyo for example) is proposed. An orbital vehicle servicing Low Earth Orbit was introduced at the begining of the 18^th exercise.

This "competition", proposed by the Astronaut Club Européen (ACE) and its industrial and institutional partners, is open to students from European higher education establishments¹ in teams of 2 to 5 participants. The aim of the competition is to explore different aspects of a suborbital or an orbital manned vehicle such as: propulsion, economics, legal aspects, medicine, crew training, etc. Partners are lookinbg forward to seeing new solutions that can be applied to vehicles currently under development.

Students participating to the Student Aerospace Challenge will therefore have the privilege of adding an original experience to their training, bringing them even them closer to world of aerospace.

¹: Member States of the European Space Agency (ESA)), namely: Member States of the European Space Agency (ESA), namely : Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.

Slovakia, Slovenia, Latvia and Lithuania have associate member status. Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus and Malta have cooperation agreements with ESA.

 Process

 WPs - Overview