MONTREAL — Students at Concordia University in Montreal have pulled off what they're calling the first attempted space launch in Canada this century.
Early Friday morning, they launched a rocket from a remote site in northern Quebec, the culmination of a project seven years in the making.
"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."
Starsailor, a 13-metre liquid-fuel rocket, took off just after 5:30 a.m., though the launch didn't go exactly as planned. Randy said the rocket split into pieces shortly after taking off and did not reach space. The goal had been to launch the rocket into space and have it fall back to Earth with a parachute, where the students could recover it.
Still, Randy called the project a success. "We cleared the launch tower. We had stable flight, our telemetry worked normally," he said. "And so for us, we've learned a huge amount with this mission."
Randy said the mission was the first attempted space launch from Canadian soil in more than 25 years, and the Starsailor is the largest student-built rocket ever to fly. He said the experience was an opportunity to "show the world that space can be exciting still, even in a country where we're maybe not focused on it."
He believes Canada should be more interested in having its own rocket launch capability. "In a world where there may be more and more tensions between countries, you would probably want to be able to be independent as much as possible in as large a variety of technology as possible," he said.
The project was born in 2018 as part of a U.S.-based competition that offered US$1 million for a student-led university team that launched a liquid-fuel rocket into space. The challenge was derailed during the COVID-19 pandemic, but Space Concordia persevered.
Randy, who chose to attend Concordia three years ago specifically to join the rocketry club, said he's spent more time on the Starsailor than he has in school. "It's like your entire existence is devoted to this project," he said.
The team is now hoping to retrieve some of the debris from the rocket before heading back to Montreal. The launch took place about 250 kilometres north of the Cree community of Mistissini, and Randy said team members did outreach with local youth to get them excited about space. Some community members also visited the launch site, he said.
The university says more than 700 Concordia students have contributed to the Starsailor program since it began seven years ago.
Now that it's all over, Randy said, the students are a bit dazed, and are trying to work out what they're going to do next.
"It's like every day you come … the rocket is there. It's kind of like a person in the room. There's always someone working on it," he said. "And now it's gone."
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Aug. 15, 2025.
Maura Forrest, The Canadian Press
