Concordia University students launch rocket from northern Quebec

More than 700 Concordia students have contributed to the Starsailor rocket program since it began seven years ago, the university says.

Students at Concordia University in Montreal have pulled off what they’re calling the first attempted space launch in Canada this century.

They launched a rocket from a remote site in northern Quebec early Friday morning, , the culmination of a project seven years in the making.

“We’re trying to prove that students can also do hard things,” said Simon Randy, president of student group Space Concordia. “It’s not just companies or large government organizations. It’s really people who have the drive and the grit to work on these large projects.”

Starsailor, a 13-metre liquid-fuel rocket, took off just after 5:30 a.m., though the launch didn’t go exactly as planned. Randy said the rocket split into pieces shortly after taking off and did not reach space. The goal had been to launch the rocket into space and have it fall back to Earth with a parachute, where the students could recover it.

Still, Randy called the project a success. “We cleared the launch tower. We had stable flight, our telemetry worked normally,” he said. “And so for us, we’ve learned a huge amount with this mission.”

Randy said the mission was the first attempted space launch from Canadian soil in more than 25 years, and the Starsailor is the largest student-built rocket ever to fly.

He said the experience was an opportunity to “show the world that space can be exciting still, even in a country where we’re maybe not focused on it.”

He believes Canada should be more interested in having its own rocket launch capability.