It's been an action-packed, exciting semester for GU Rocketry, so before exams kick off and the stress kicks in, let's look back at everything we've done!
This semester we have been lucky enough to invite two members of industry to the university to deliver talks to our members. At the beginning of February, we welcomed Dr Richard Brown from Sophrodyne to give a talk on 'Shockwaves and the Design of Future Spacecraft' and he then went on to take up an advisory role for the society. Later in the month, we were joined by Skyrora engineer Atheeq Hassani for a talk on the topic 'Propulsion Development of the Skyrora XL Launch Vehicle.'
Sometimes students have a tendency to neglect the importance of a work-life balance, luckily our socials this semester have been perfect for giving our members a chance to socialise with each other outside of the work they do within the society. In January we attended Craft Pottery in Finnieston for some boozy cocktail painting and good company, and in February we hosted a joint subcrawl with GU Orbit, Strathclyde SEDs and Strathclyde AIS in an attempt to form connections and friendships across societies:
Then in March, we held another joint social, this time photo bingo with the members of UG Racing:
Finally, at the end of March, we had our last social, participating in a night of games and competition with Beer Olympics, followed by an awards night to acknowledge the hard work of our members, and also to determine who in the society needs to spend a bit more time away from Teams!
At the end of February, we had our full team meeting, so we could all gather to hear about what each section of the society had been doing so far. We heard from our Mach-23 team who will be going to competition this year, we heard about the progress made with Saltire-3 so far from its project manager and the leads of the project's sub-teams, and how the project would progress in the future, learned a bit more about the Chimera propulsion project, and heard from our Business and Operations team about what they had been doing to keep the society ticking away in the background:
Last but not least, at the beginning of April we finally launched tickets to the very first UK Amateur Rocketry Conference to be held in Glasgow this August! Our conference team has been working extremely hard on this project for months, and we're so excited that we could finally share it with everyone! The conference will be an amazing opportunity for student Rocketry teams across the UK to meet and connect with each other and industry members over a weekend of talks and networking workshops (buy your tickets now on our website if you haven't already!).
As we enter the exam season, I would just like to wish everyone luck with any and all upcoming assessments, everyone in the society is behind you and we all hope for the best for each other. Sadly, the end of the semester and the lead-up to summer means some of our members will be graduating and moving on to pastures new, so for anyone leaving us soon; goodbye, good luck, thank you for everything and we are all rooting for you!