Radboud University
Helping to launch a rocket as a student, that's already quite something. Receiving a loan of 100,000 euros to bring the discovery you made during that study project to the market – you could say you are doing well. Three students from TU Eindhoven, who gained 'rocket experience' at the Radboud Radio Lab, were able to start their company Spacecific at the Nijmegen Science Park thanks to this loan from Oost NL. With their localization system, tracing a certain type of rocket is a lot less expensive and the entire flight can also be followed.
Benno Driessen, Rik van de Wetering and Reinier Seuren are the people behind Spacecific, who have received a loan of 100,000 euros from Oost NL, the development agency of the eastern Netherlands. In recent years, they worked within the Radboud Radio Lab on a project with German, Swedish and European space agencies that launches rockets with student experiments on board.
Benno, Rik and Reinier's experiment, which has since led to Spacecific, is a localization system for so-called sounding rockets. These are small rockets with a diameter of about 7 to 30 centimeters. The length of a sounding rocket can be as long as 3 to 4 meters, but more crucial in this story is the diameter - because the smaller the diameter, the harder a rocket is to locate. “We're currently working on a system for a rocket with a diameter of just 3 centimeters,” Benno says.
A sounding rocket is a measuring rocket, flying at an altitude of 40 to 400 kilometers. They can be used, for example, to test telescopes placed on satellites - think of the James Webb Telescope. In a state of weightlessness, sounding rockets can also be used for measurements. You can achieve such a state with a sounding rocket because of its speed and altitude, Reinier explains. Interesting for materials researchers, for example, who would like to study materials without the influence of gravity. “But then you want to know very precisely at what point exactly what happens in that rocket. And then our system comes into play.”
“It's like Find my iPhone, but for rockets,” Rik explains. “It's extremely challenging to locate these kinds of rockets, especially in flight. They go high and fast, and you can't use GPS in flight. Military systems do allow the missiles to be located in flight, but these sorts of systems are not available to other parties. A commercial localization system has different requirements. As a result, it also costs less than such a military system.”
Spacecific is working with T-minus engineering in Delft, a company that builds sounding rockets. “Their customers are research institutes such as universities and space agencies. Amongst other things, they do atmospheric measurements in the ionosphere, between 30 and 80 km altitude. There are not really other means to make measurements at that height. And it's interesting to know how the ionosphere behaves under different conditions, because that affects satellite communications. It's also important for climate research to know how the atmosphere behaves.”
There is, in short, a lot of different science made possible by such a rocket. A good localization system, which tells you exactly what has been measured where, is important for this. Business partner T-minus and investor Oost NL believe in the system that Spacecific has developed and which is currently undergoing further testing.
The goal the young researcher-entrepreneurs have in mind is to sell their localization system to parties such as the European Space Agency (ESA) and national space agencies in Europe. “These agencies are a bit reluctant at the moment, but if the test flights are successful, we expect more interest. That's how we want to build it up and expand it to the rest of Europe.”
The still young company Spacecific is, after EnginX (also located at the Science Park near Radboud University), the second spin-off company of the Radboud Radio Lab. Marc Klein Wolt, director of that lab, is proud: “The Radboud Radio Lab focuses on developing and testing instruments for astronomy. We support scientists from the astrophysics department at Radboud University. For example, we collaborated on a project in which 1600 antennas were added to the Pierre Auger Observatory in Argentina. We also support the Event Horizon Telescope, which was used to take the first pictures of a black hole. I'm also involved myself, such as with the construction of the Africa Millimeter Telescope (AMT) in Namibia.
In the Radboud Radio Lab, astronomers and technicians, engineers work together. From the very beginning we also trained students to participate: interesting for them and for us, now and in the future. We did this partly by having student teams build and launch rockets, which is also how the team from Spacecific started.
Launching rockets is not what we're about, though: you want to be able to track them. That technology is getting better and better. We're currently also working on a project to figure out whether the same technology can be applied in everyday life. Think, for example, of patients with parkinson’s disease who can move more freely if you can follow them better from a distance. You might think that this is easier than following a rocket, but the opposite is true: such a rocket usually behaves a lot more predictably than a human being. In short: Radboud Radio Lab continues to focus on astronomy, but all sorts of other wonderful things can come out of it.”
