Specials

The category that features all (magazine) specials, e.g. recurring articles (internship, Time Flies, etc).

The 6 Day War
Aviation, Time Flies

The 6 Day War

Operation Focus (Mivtza Moked) Intro In 1967, Israel was faced with a serious geopolitical existential threat of war on 3 fronts by its neighbors. Israel decided to go for pre-emptive airstrikes and won the war in just six days. How did the IAF achieve this success? The Six-Day War was fought by Israel and its neighboring states of Egypt, Syria and Jordan with the backing of almost all Arab countries. The June 1967 war in particular was not only a watershed in the history of the Middle East, it was also one of the rare occurrences in the recent history of a pre-emptive war, a type of war which breaks out primarily if the attacker feels that it will itself be the target of a military attack in the short term. Political Background The root cause of Arab-Israeli conflict has been the c...
TU Delft’s Solar Boat Team
Specials, Student projects

TU Delft’s Solar Boat Team

Amongst the facilities that the TU Delft offers to its students is the D:DREAM Hall. D:DREAM stands for “Dream Realization of Extremely Advanced Machines”. The D:DREAM Hall is home to a variety of engineering teams, the so-called DREAM Teams. A DREAM Team is a great way for a student to learn many essential engineering skills in a relatively short time. The teams typically start in September; working towards competitions taking place in summer. This leaves the teams with eight to ten months until they need to deliver their product. This means that there is little room for errors, too many design iterations and other delays. To work well as a team is of paramount importance. The teams function as full-fledged companies, in order to give a more realistic engineering experience. The chall...
Eco-Runner
Specials, Student projects

Eco-Runner

The Eco-Runner competes in an annual event called the Shell Eco-marathon. A staggering 3000 students, spread over 200 student teams from all over Europe, compete in different classes within the competition. The Eco-Runner is a novel car designed to compete under the category of one of the most futuristic engineering concepts: cars using Hydrogen as its energy source. From Delft to Moscow and back, on one liter of hydrogen? What was deemed once impossible is not so anymore. Team Eco-Runner has been successful in achieving this goal and has remained a consistent performer at the Shell Eco-marathon. This marathon is one of the premium competitions in the world that attracts many engineering students to put their skills and knowledge to the test. The task of the event is t...
Flying Through the Glass Ceiling
Specials

Flying Through the Glass Ceiling

There continues to be a considerable gender gap across engineering fields. Discriminatory workplace dynamics persist in discouraging women from pursuing an engineering-related degree and career. Can women overcome these obstacles or will the engineering world continue to dissuade them? Whenever you find yourself around other engineering students or working in a project group, I urge you to take a step back and observe the gender diversity. It’s quite fair to say that there are, in general, more men than women. Now have a thought as to why that is. Are women simply ill-suited for engineering? If your immediate answer isn’t “NO”, then I highly suggest you re-evaluate your internal moral compass. Nevertheless, to what do we owe this gender imbalance? The lack of a Y chromosome seems to have...
NASA’s Asteroid Grand Challenge: Interview with Jason Kessler
Astronomy and planetary sciences, Interview, Space engineering, Space flight, Specials

NASA’s Asteroid Grand Challenge: Interview with Jason Kessler

The narrative around asteroids has largely been one of ‘Impact-Threat Science’. The concept that asteroids are a threat has lead to a push in reconfiguring astronomy as ‘interventionist science’, ultimately suggesting militaristic endings. Many other asteroid scientists suggest contrasting innovative solutions. We caught up with Jason Kessler, Program Executive of NASA’s Asteroid Grand Challenge at the Border Sessions Festival in The Hague, where he was one of the speakers. NEOO, ARM and AGC: In 1998, NASA initiated Near Earth Objects (NEO) Observations programs with the aim to discover 90% of the NEOs larger than one kilometer in diameter and in 2005, Congress extended that goal to include 90% of the NEOs larger than 140 meters. The programs have been remarkably successful at achiev...
Supersonic Commercial Travel: the Past, the Present, and the Future
Aviation, Operations, Specials, Time Flies

Supersonic Commercial Travel: the Past, the Present, and the Future

The Concorde is a widely recognized plane, perhaps even more than the Boeing 747. To this day, it remains the only supersonic plane that operated commercial flights, despite a disastrous attempt from Tupolev to imitate the Anglo-French plane. Since its last flight in 2003, no commercial passenger has flown past the speed of sound. This could all be changing in the coming years as more and more private companies are investing in supersonic private jets, along with NASA’s recent announcement. Gone are the days where any passenger could travel from Paris or London to New York in a little over three hours. These days, any traveler will have to take anywhere between five and a half and over nine hours. Whether you blame it on FAA noise regulations or the economy, the final outcome re...
Internship: Discovering and Improving The BAC Mono
Internship, Specials

Internship: Discovering and Improving The BAC Mono

In October 2015 I started my six month internship at Briggs Automotive Company (BAC) in Liverpool. BAC was founded in 2009 by the brothers Neil and Ian Briggs and is the manufacturer of the BAC Mono, a single seater road legal sports car, inspired to bring the Formula 1 experience to the road. The Mono is lightweight, under 600kg, due to the tubular space frame chassis and carbon composite body panels. The sequential Hewland gearbox, directly derived from Formula 3, is a structural component, bearing all rear suspension loads. The 2,5L four cylinder Mountune engine delivers over 300bhp, making the Mono both quick (0-60mph in 2,8s) and fast (top speed of 170mph). This all combined with the central seating location and low center of gravity makes for a unique experie...
Internationally Recognized Dutch Designs
Aviation, Specials, Student projects

Internationally Recognized Dutch Designs

Students from the Faculty of Aerospace Engineering, Delft, Netherlands have been actively competing in prestigious International design competitions that are organised by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA). This year, two teams, one undergraduate and the other graduate, both achieved second places in the competitions. Dutch Designs can be typically characterized as minimalist, experimental and innovative. Not only do these traits apply to chairs and buildings designed by famous Dutch engineers, they also extend to aircraft designs created by students of the Aerospace faculty. Every year AIAA organizes aircraft design competitions in three different categories: undergraduate, undergraduate individual, and graduate. Students are asked to submit a proposal for a n...
1957: Sputnik and the Space Race
Space flight, Specials, Time Flies

1957: Sputnik and the Space Race

October 4, 1957, the first man-made Earth satellite sends a steady beeping signal on radio for everyone to hear. While its creator Sergei Korolev, his team and the whole Soviet Union celebrate this success, the people of the western world are stunned and terrified. With the technology to deliver satellites into space, the Soviet Union had an advantage over the United States. Although it looked like they had won, the race was not over yet. This battle of technology soon became a battle of ideology and a fight for prestige. Nonetheless without the Space Race, many technologies would not have been developed. First article of the series where we take a look back at the famed 'Space Race'. ROCKETS? Rocket technology is older than one would think. Already around 300B.C, Chinese used...
The Hidden Runway
Aviation, Specials, Time Flies

The Hidden Runway

In the wake of World War II, Vietnam had become the next major battleground of the 20th century. It started with a battle for independence against the French, led by Ho Chi Minh and backed by the communist nations. Along with Laos and Cambodia, Vietnam finally became independent, but the country was split up in a communist northern and a democratic southern part. After attempts to reunite the country through elections failed, the southern part sunk deeper into political instability. Prime Minister Diem had failed to sustain peace and unity among its citizens, and as a consequence, the pro-communist National Liberation Front, better known as the Viet Cong, started guerrilla attacks from within South Vietnam. As the South Vietnamese army proved incapable of dealing with this disturbance, th...