Reaching for the stars: Montreal students’ space mission

Concordia students launched a rocket from Northern Quebec, aiming to hit an exploration milestone in Canadian space. Genevieve Beauchemin reports.

A team of Concordia University students gathered at a remote base camp on Cree territory in northern Quebec to launch the largest, most powerful student-built rocket ever made.

The event captured on a livestream, may not have gone off quite as planned, still it marked an engineering breakthrough after years of effort.

Cheers greeted the moment just after the countdown when a ball of white light sped up to the sky.

“This is insane,” said one student staring up at the rocket.

The Space Concordia team’s goal was to breach the edge of space at an altitude of 100 kilometres. Their liquid fuel rocket, Starsailor, blasted off at 5:34 am. They now say the rocket did not cross the Kármán line — the internationally recognized boundary of space.

“What we can tell you, is that it looks like the rocket burned out earlier and separated earlier than planned,” said Space Concordia’s Hannah Halcro on the livestream.

The liftoff was seven years in the making and sparked by an intercollegiate space race. In 2018, teams of universities and colleges entered a contest to launch a liquid fuel rocket into space. That was cancelled due to the pandemic, but the Concordia team forged ahead, determined to make history on its own terms.

Over the years, more than 700 students contributed to the project, investing thousands of hours into design, testing, and development. Their rocket represented not just academic ambition, but a dream shared across generations of students.

They built a space program and worked in collaboration with the Cree community in the Mistassini region to prepare for launch.

Transport Canada cleared the mission for takeoff and the local airspace was closed, but two previous attempts were scrubbed due to poor weather conditions.

This time, it was all systems go.

But this is rocket science, and so it is hard. Some students say they feared the rocket may not launch, that it could blow up the launch tower, and so while not reaching space is not ideal, they say, it is far from a failure.

“The sky is not the limit obviously,” Space Concordia President Simon Randy told CTV News at the end of a long day. “We have proven that we have a seat at the table of launch into space.”

The team is now analyzing flight data and will look at debris to determine Starsailor’s exact trajectory.

Still the future engineers’ hopes for the launch went far beyond expectations.

“See you in space next time,” Halcro signed off.