ABOUT
ABOUT
SunrIde is an extracurricular rocket engineering project at the University of Sheffield. The team contains over 80 members ranging from first-year undergraduates to PhD students. The overall goal of the project is to make space engineering more accessible to students in the UK and to become the first UK student-led team to launch a rocket to an altitude of 100km, or the “Kármán line”, the internationally recognised boundary to space.
The team currently holds the UK Open Altitude Record at 36,274 ft. During this summer, we will attempt to set this record even higher with the launch of our flagship two-stage rocket, Karman Alpha, in California.
It's a non-profit research team formed and run by students from the University of Sheffield in the UK. In 2019, we achieved a major accomplishment when we broke the UK’s 19-year-long altitude record at 36,274ft. This breakthrough was widely covered by national and international media news, leading to an expansion of our community to 80+ young engineers, all working on various rocketry projects.
We are committed to sharing what we know with the world. We strive to provide hands-on rocketry and space technologies experience to our members and the general public through our 40-hour training course on rocketry, which has attracted 200 students as of 2022 and is being shared with five different universities across the UK. The course is open to everyone interested in rocketry and space engineering.
On top of this, we are collaborating with faculty members to provide teaching opportunities to local schools on building miniature rockets to improve access to aerospace and STEM earlier in the educational timeline.
Our activities span from performance rocketry (Karman Alpha series, Jocelyn, Dart) to liquid propulsion (SunFire Engines). We are also working with The Universities of Oxford, York, and Liverpool on a refurbishment project to develop a high-altitude ride-share program, which will enable secondary school pupils in the local area to design and build small scientific payloads to launch on our rocket.
Sheffield Space Initiative
The Sheffield Space Initiative (SSI) was founded in 2017 to further engage in the science and engineering challenges involved in the exploration of space.
It is a highly cross-disciplinary group of projects that are now developing a real heritage of success for Sheffield and our STEM students in particular. It aims to share knowledge and experience of this exciting industry through research-led teaching methods.
SSI has now also forged partnerships with other institutions in the UK, Europe, Asia, Australia and America.
