At 5:34am on August 15, a Starsailor rocket blasted off from a base camp 250 km north of Mistissini and soared into dawn’s early light. Despite a premature end just short of outer space, the team from Concordia University was thrilled to have launched the largest student-built rocket ever flown.
“It puts a lot of wind in our sails,” said Oleg Khalimonov, director of the Starsailor program. “Had it gone another four seconds, it would have made it to space. Now the team knows we can do it – it sounds funny, but we didn’t even know if it would fly.”
As the first attempted space launch in Canada since 1998 and the first ever in Quebec, Starsailor’s success marks a pivotal moment in the country’s cosmic ambitions. That it was accomplished by a group of engineering students in collaboration with the Cree Nation of Mistissini is all the more impressive.
The project began seven years ago among friends building much smaller rockets for university competitions. When a million-dollar contest for sending a rocket to space fizzled out due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the team pressed on anyways, quarantining together in a remote house for eight months and continuing experiments in farmers’ fields and bathtubs.
“It was way harder than we thought,” admitted Khalimonov. “We had to build a launch tower, the engine, the test stand. On our first engine test, everything blew up and we have no idea why. It took us another year and it blew up again.”
Eventually a sufficiently reliable engine was developed using a volatile mixture of kerosene and liquid oxygen fuel, powering the 13-metre Starsailor rocket similarly to how companies like SpaceX launch satellites. It’s the most powerful student-built rocket engine ever recorded. About 700 students overall contributed to the project’s countless testing and component redesigning.
“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.”
Seeking a remote base camp that’s accessible by road, Space Concordia contacted Mistissini in January to explore possibilities. After careful deliberation and contingent on the necessary authorizations, Cree tallyman Harry Coonishish and the company holding the land lease approved a site formerly used as a mining company’s airstrip.
“Never before had anyone even thought of doing this here,” Khalimonov said. “The fact we could do this in our own backyard was a cool opportunity – we don’t have to go to NASA or even Nova Scotia. It feels special to do this here. The kids here are like, this is amazing.”
While livestream meetings with Chief and Council shared the team’s progress, anticipation built as approvals arrived from Transport Canada and SOPFEU, reassuring community members there was a low safety risk. With the Coonishish family building lodging and kitchen areas, the rocket’s components were transported north in wooden crates.
Canada and Quebec were represented on two of the rocket’s sides while the third was emblazoned in Cree syllabics. This was inspired by attempts to translate Starsailor into Cree. Someone suggested the Cree mythological character Chikabesh, or Starboy, whose myth cycle usually ends with him travelling to the moon.
“The students were more than willing to put Chikabesh in Cree syllabics with a picture of a beaver, because it’s in our community logo,” explained Council member Pamela MacLeod, who helped link the team with the right people. “Elders would ask in Cree, ‘So what happened with Chikabesh – did it fly yet?’”
In the weeks before lift-off, Space Concordia made a community presentation and engaged in numerous activities at the youth centre. Curious community members came to marvel at the rocket site. When MacLeod visited on the Sunday before launch, there were 65 current and former Space Concordia members camped out.
Waiting out more than a week of freezing rain and other unfavourable weather conditions, Khalimonov would call Transport Canada at 4am each morning to inform them whether a launch would happen during the brief daily window before air traffic and air currents picked up. Conditions were finally perfect on that Friday morning.
“My experience was wow,” said the tallyman’s granddaughter Esther Coonishish, who witnessed the event from the launch site. “I was with my parents and my grandpa and our foster boy. We were all in shock when we saw it.”
With a perfect lift-off, the Starsailor ascended in a flash of light for 23 seconds until reaching peak aerodynamic pressure about three times the speed of sound, known as MaxQ, when the nose cone separated earlier than expected. Designed to release a parachute for post-flight recovery, it was recognized as one of the rocket’s weakest links.
“A rocket works kind of like a baseball,” Khalimonov explained. “The entire time the baseball is in the player’s hand it’s going faster and faster, putting all their energy into their throw. That’s only a very short time so when the engine cuts off it keeps flying all the way up. It was in that period of full acceleration that it broke.”
With a Chibougamau seaplane, the team recovered the flight computer along with half the rocket nearly intact, among other debris that help tell the trajectory’s story. Optimistic that “there’s one little problem left to solve,” Khalimonov said the team already has a second design that could be built relatively quickly to give it another shot.
The project is fully designed for conducting space science, potentially unleashing new accessibility to zero-gravity research at the university level. It certainly captivated the host community’s imagination once Mistissini Council spread the word that the launch was finally happening.
“It was fascinating for all of us,” said MacLeod. “A relative said it’s all her eight-year-old son talks about. I wanted to see this happen for our community – I’m happy it turned out so well.”
After pursuing their dream for so long, Space Concordia has no intention of stopping now. Khalimonov, who has been with the project from the beginning, through graduation and now while working toward a master’s degree, sees it as “seven years of an eight-year project.”
“We’ll remember this experience for the rest of our lives,” Khalimonov said. “This wouldn’t have been possible without [the Cree]. I hope we made at least one astronaut – one kid who’s like, I’m going to space.”