Space Concordia is made up of four divisions with each team working towards bringing a technical space project to life on the cutting edge of space engineering. These projects often perform at competitions across Canada and internationally.

Rocketry

Space Concordia’s Rocketry division has been building bigger and better sounding rockets for the last 5 years. Starting with altitudes of 10,000ft, the team participated in the Spaceport America Cup, the world’s largest rocketry competition, consisting of over 125 international universities. In summer 2018, SC launched their first supersonic rocket ever, Supersonice, with a solid motor to a target altitude of 30,000ft, carrying a sophisticated fluid dynamic experiment onboard. As the Concordia University’s first supersonic aircraft, the vehicle reached speeds of over 2400km/h in just 3 seconds. The team triumphed: winning 1st place in both the Advanced Category and the Space Dynamics Payload Challenge over universities such as Stanford, MIT, Caltech and McGill.

Now we are shooting even higher.

We are currently competing in the Base 11 Space Challenge, an intercollegiate challenge to develop a single-stage liquid fuel rocket to surpass the Karman line; to get to space. If we are successful, we will be the first students to build a rocket to reach space, PLUS we will have built the most powerful amateur rocket motor in history! We are a small team, and we are all working very hard to achieve this goal. We plan to launch the suborbital rocket in early 2020, with testing beginning in May of this year!

Spacecraft

Space Concordia’s Spacecraft Division specializes in CubeSats; small satellites ideal for cost-effective launch & deployment. We have been building CubeSats and winning competitions since 2010. These constricting dimensions, no bigger than a breadbox, have pushed us to be creative and efficient in our designs, demanding the best performance from our team, especially in our latest project as part of the Canadian CubSat Project (CCP).

The CCP is a CSA initiative to train the next generation of Canadian space engineers and scientists. We are one of the 15 teams selected across Canada to build a CubeSat fit for launch in 2021. Concordia engineering professor Khashayar Khorasani is leading a team of 10 professors across the Gina Cody School of Engineering and Computer Science, and over 30 graduate and undergraduate students from Space Concordia

Space Concordia's Orbital Dust Imaging Nanosat (SC-ODIN) will study the impact of dust aerosols on radiative forcing and to improve climate models. The spacecraft will retrieve scientific dust measurements with an onboard hyperspectral imager. Furthermore, we aim to provide flight heritage to a new electronic component that shows promising resilience to radiation from the harsh environment of Space.

Robotics

Space Concordia’s Robotics Division focuses on building strong and intelligent rovers able to operate in harsh desert conditions, perform a variety of tasks with a mobile arm, and perform onboard experiments to detect signs of life in soil.

The team plans to enter their latest rover ASTRo in three competitions this summer: the University Rover Challenge in Utah, US; the Canadian International Rover Challenge in Alberta; and the European Rover Challenge in Kielce, Poland.

Special Projects

Space Concordia’s Special Projects Division is a platform for students to develop independent space projects that exist outside of the other division’s wheelhouses. We wish to promote new innovative ideas: may it be for internal R&D, university competitions, capstone projects, working groups, case competitions, or genuine curiosity. Examples notably include the Icarus High Altitude Balloon and the winning entry “AD ASTRA” in the XENOS Initiative Solar Ecosystem 2018 competition.