From educational programmes to professional projects: finding flight opportunities

Nowadays, lots of opportunities are offered to students to fly their own experiment on board of rockets or balloons. Thanks to those opportunities, young scientists have a chance to experience hands-on project and even to find a vocation: pursuing experimentations on-board of flight missions. However, it can appear, for these young professionals, that flying on board sounding rockets or stratospheric balloons is hard to access or to afford. Yet the opportunities exist and are waiting for them! Space educational programmes enable students to learn, in a short period of time, all phases of a scientific project; a unique chance to experience a full project cycle from objectives’ definition to the publication of the results. Thus, students define mission requirements, design, manufacture, test and finally launch their own experiment! On REXUS/BEXUS [1] for example, students experience an end-to-end project with all disciplines required by a Space project (science, mechanics, electronics, software, system engineering, management, finances, outreach). The concretisation of all efforts occurs during the launch campaign, organised at SSC Esrange (Sweden). The campaign is always an intense period for the participants: high level of concentration, pressure, stress but a massive work that pays off during the flight and after. Usually, this key event enables ideas and improvements to pop up; a prolific event to define the next step of an experiment, maybe on a future mission! Many students start their professional career after the campaign. Despite new ideas and the drive to pursue, a common idea of these young professionals is that it is hard to access to flight opportunities on sounding rockets or stratospheric balloons while not being a student anymore: too expensive to finance a campaign? too complex to organise? who to contact? Many questions that it is time to answer. Yes, it is possible! At SSC, we enable access to stratospheric balloons, sounding rockets and drop tests on a cost-efficient entrance level or fully funded through national and international programmes. One of these examples is the EOSTRE mission [2] (Experiment on Outliving Microorganisms under Stratospheric Environment), developed by FH Aachen University of Applied Sciences (Germany) in collaboration with the University of Oulu (Finland); a former BEXUS team that developed its own balloon mission, launched successfully from Esrange in March 2020. Several former students from REXUS/BEXUS have joined professional opportunities, such as the HEMERA [3] programme, with the experiments GRASS from INAF (Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica) and STRAINS (Sapienza University, Rome) and launched it from Esrange in September 2021. Today, SSC is also offering ride share opportunities on sounding rockets with the programme SubOrbital Express [4]; first successful launch was in June 2019 on board MASER 14 (S1X-1). Opportunities are still open for the next missions in fall 2022 (S1X-3) and in 2023 (S1X-4