Kosmos Rocketry is a rocket competition team from the Joinville Technological Center (CTJ), one of the UFSC (Federal University of Santa Catarina) campi, which has the objective of promoting aerospace technological evolution in Brazil, through the development of rockets for international competitions and the holding of workshops and exhibitions.
Founded in 2013, Kosmos was run by several generations of CTJ students, giving them the opportunity to apply the concepts seen during the course, in addition to developing soft and hard skills.
Over the years, it has attended several competitions and was won several awards in different editions of national and international competitions, such as the Brazilian Minirocket Festival and the Latin America Space Challenge (LASC), but in 2022 it will face its biggest challenge: the Spaceport America Cup (SAC) ), the largest university rocket competition in the world, which takes place in the United States.
Spaceport America is a commercial space base located in the Jornada del Muerto basin, New Mexico. The space favors the launch of several projects during the year, in addition to annually promoting the Spaceport America Cup, together with the IREC (Intercollegiate Rocket Engineering Competition), attracting rocketry teams from all over the world in the most important event of the modality. SAC has rocket competitions in several categories, an academic conference with lectures and seminars with experts, as well as interaction between participating teams, professors, professionals in the field, industry representatives and amateur enthusiasts, which results in excellent exchanges of experiences.
Kosmos is among the five Brazilian teams selected to participate in the 2022 edition next June, being the only representative of the southern region of this edition and the first to bear the name of Santa Catarina.
Currently the team has 4 active projects, these being the FTK (Kosmos Training Rocket), the Alfa, the Nebula and the VLK-1 (Kosmos Launch Vehicle), the last one will participate in the SAC in the 3 km apogee category. The VLK-1 project started in 2021, is in the prototype development and testing phase, with some subsystems already being manufactured and has the support of the Brazilian Space Agency (AEB), which financed part of the project value in materials.
Despite being the first rocket in the Kosmos 3000-meter category, its subsystems are upgrades of subsystems already validated in other projects. This strategy allows more advanced rockets to be developed in a short period of time and with great reliability.
To make all this possible, the team is looking for new sponsors and also supporters through a crowdfunding campaign launched on its website. This crowdfunding campaign has several digital rewards and even some physical ones, such as receiving your own personalized rocket (already used in other launches by the team). To support, simply go to www.kosmosrocketry.com/crowdfunding and choose which level of support is best for you.
SpaceBR Show 2022
In addition, Kosmos will be at the SpaceBR Show 2022, where they will have an exhibition stand for the projects and we will seek to create connections with more people and companies. The event will take place between May 17th and 19th in São Paulo and will be attended by several companies and start-ups from the international space market to hold a Space Industry Fair and also a Hybrid Forum (in person and online), with simultaneous translation, in which local and global trends and opportunities for the entire production chain of the sector will be presented and discussed.