Launch Canada is wrapping up its fourth year of student competition today (Friday, Aug. 22), after a multi-day event featuring a conference and rocket launches.
The national, non-profit organization encourages students to learn about rocketry and aerospace, with industry and government partners working alongside them. This year saw roughly 500 students, volunteers, sponsors and 100 visitors to the grounds in Timmins and the lands of Mattagami First Nation.
SpaceQ spoke with Adam Trumpour, founder and president of the engineering competition, to learn more about how this year’s event went and what is on the books for next year. (At the time of the interview, the results of the competition were not yet known as teams were still competing.)
SpaceQ: What’s new about Launch Canada this year?
Trumpour: The competition has been running since 2022 – so this is our fourth year, and our third year in Timmins. It’s our biggest yet: We have more teams, more students, more rockets, and more volunteers, and we’ve got teams flying to higher altitudes than ever.
This year, at a time when Canada is realizing just how vulnerable our over-dependence on the U.S. has made us, it feels like Launch Canada’s mission to build the talent and technologies that will expand Canada’s space capabilities is more important than ever.
SpaceQ: Have the divisions or competition changed?
Trumpour: We have the same competition categories as in past years. We did create a new, separate trophy for the winner of the technology demonstration category for this year, though. We had found that judging technology projects, along with launch projects for a single grand-prize trophy, was an “apples to oranges” problem. So the technology demonstration category now has its own grand-prize trophy.
SpaceQ: Can you talk to me a bit about the conference – what you were aiming to do, how many people attended, an dwhat was notable about it for attendees?
Trumpour: The conference is one of the real pillars of the event. It gives the students a chance to showcase their projects – not only to our judges and safety reviewers, but also to our supporters such as MDA Space, Pratt & Whitney, Reaction Dynamics and NordSpace, and to the local community as a whole. The event is really part conference, part trade show, and part career fair, so it’s also a chance for our students to connect with top Canadian aerospace and related companies. Usually, a lot of resumes are exchanged.
Our goal has always been to make aerospace and rocketry visible and accessible to more Canadians, and “de-mystify” rocket science. The conference and its accompanying talks and outreach events are an important part of how we do that. In addition to the students presenting aspects of their projects and technologies, we had some amazing speakers this year from Canada and abroad, including representatives of MDA Space, Pratt & Whitney Canada, Transport Canada, NordSpace, Reaction Dynamics, Aerojet Rocketdyne, and Reflect Orbital.
The opening ceremony that kicked it off was a particular highlight this year, featuring Chief Jennifer Constant of the Mattagami First Nation, Ontario Minister of Northern Economic Development George Pirie, Timmins Councillor Steve Black – and a virtual appearance from Brig. Gen. and 3 Canadian Space Division Commander Chris Horner, which was met with thunderous applause.
All told, we had about 500 students, volunteers, and members of sponsoring companies take part, and over 100 visitors from the community.
SpaceQ: Can you talk to me about the connections you are forging with Timmins and Mattagami First Nation? What kinds of partnerships and outreach have you been doing with them over the years?
Trumpour: Our partnerships with the City of Timmins and the Mattagami First Nation have really been central to our event. From the beginning, we’ve felt incredibly welcomed into their communities, and it continues to be a real pleasure to welcome them into ours. Timmins has been a major sponsor of the event, with Chief Constant, city councillors, and Mayor Michelle Boileau making the time to join in our events and highlighting the importance of the event to their communities.
We have a major outreach program with Science Timmins and Mattagami that accompanies the event, which we expanded on this year. We had a team of volunteers head up to Mattagami in May for a big introduction to rocket science workshop with elementary- and high-school-aged kids. We followed that up with rocket-building sessions with Mattagami, Science Timmins, and Northern College during the competition.
These culminated with the students coming out to the launch site to launch their own rockets, meet the university teams, and learn about the Canadian space industry. The feedback we got from the students was phenomenal, with several of the Mattagami kids saying that our events with them are a highlight of their year. Our partners at Science Timmins told us that many of their students are now more motivated than ever to pursue higher education in related fields – it’s hard to imagine a better testimonial than that!
I think one of the best things to come out of this collaboration is the many interactions it facilitates between our students and members of the community. For example, the Mattagami First Nation Fire Department is on site the whole week. They not only help keep the event safe, but they’re valued members of the team and always have a ton of fun meeting the students and watching the rocket launches.
SpaceQ: Can you talk about the benefits for students in competing, and if you can point to any metrics of success – such as hires – for those who participated in past years?
Trumpour: Particularly in aerospace engineering, there tends to be a very large gap between theory and practice. What our students gain is real-world experience of the complete engineering design-build-test cycle. They don’t just design rockets on paper; they build actual hardware that will reach several times the speed of sound, and altitudes higher than what commercial aircraft operate at, and then they come to the event and put all their work and planning to the test.
Sometimes they don’t have a nominal flight. Sometimes they end up spending the week troubleshooting problems and ultimately don’t get off the ground, and sometimes they discover that the hardest part of building rockets isn’t the rocket itself. By having these experiences that they typically don’t get in school, they gain invaluable lessons about real-world engineering as opposed to theory – or as we like to say, “rocket engineering” vs. “rocket science.”
And this isn’t just teaching them about a specialized niche of aerospace technology. What they’re developing, fundamentally, are practical aerospace systems engineering skills. They’re learning how to approach complex, multidisciplinary problems, and they’re also learning about the “human” element of engineering: How to not just build rockets, but how to build organizations capable of building rockets.
Unsurprisingly, leading companies like MDA Space and Pratt & Whitney have been major supporters of the event, even though they don’t build rockets. They understand the value of the skills our students are developing, and we have become a major source of top-tier talent for them.
At the same time, Canada is beginning to see the emergence of its own space launch industry, and companies like Reaction Dynamics and NordSpace draw heavily from among our students. At our conference, our speaker from Reaction Dynamics emphasized that over half of their workforce consists of former rocket team members. As he put it, “We are you.”
SpaceQ: What are your plans for next year?
Trumpour: We are planning to continue expanding our launch site to accommodate the growing number of participating students and spectators, and growing our team of volunteers to support those increasing numbers. A permanent launch site remains a major goal of ours: We would love to reach the point where we can build some more permanent facilities, rather than having to make everything temporary and mobile, and turn our site into a true hub for experimental rocketry.
The livestream of the event has been getting better and better each year, and helps us share the experience of the event with a wide audience. We’re eager to continue improving it.
We’re also aiming to refine our training and educational support for our participating teams, to help give them more guidance early in their design process, and to maximize the success rate of their projects.
As always, to some extent we take our cues from our students. We’ve always taken the approach of giving them a lot of scope to decide what technologies excite and motivate them, and then working to support them and provide them with the resources necessary to be safe and successful. This year we had teams set new altitude records, and we expect that we’ll continue to see teams wanting to fly higher and faster. We’re also seeing teams increasingly branching out into new areas of rocket technology, such as active controls and thrust vectoring.
Next year will also be the fifth year of our competition, so it definitely feels like an auspicious year – and a milestone worth celebrating!
SpaceQ: Anything else you wanted to add?
Trumpour: We feel strongly that if we want people to do big, important things, they need to start with a belief that it’s actually possible. Far too often, Canadian innovators face a real uphill battle and a lack of support, particularly those pursuing areas of technology that are not among our traditional niches.
That was certainly the case when it came to space launch and propulsion, for a very long time. Student rocketry in Canada developed as a true grassroots movement that was motivated to pursue these technologies – not because Canadian government or industry decided to prioritize it or place it on a technology roadmap, but because the technology and the challenges it represented were inspiring to them, and they understood that building these capabilities for Canada was fundamentally important. But inspiration needs to be combined with opportunity if it’s going to create an impact. Launch Canada exists to help create those opportunities, and to tangibly demonstrate to some of the most talented and highly motivated young engineering talent in Canada that there are those of us who believe in them so much, that we will do everything in our power to move whatever mountains need to be moved to support them.
