Questionnaire:

1. What or who has inspired you to participate in the ERC competition?
2. What did you gain by participating in the ERC competition?
3. Where would you like to work and what would you like to do after graduation?
4. What do you think will be the most important issue for the space technologies development or in the conquest of space in the future?

IUT MARS ROVER (TURKEY) – Muhammad Samin Hasan:

1. To test my engineering skills at a global stage, I was motivated to participate in ERC.
2. Learned a lot about programming, simulation, ROS, Linux, Robotics, Team management and planning and solid verification of my programming skills.
3. I would like to work at my own startup.
4. Lack of a global standard.

EPFL XPLORE (SWITZERLAND) – Michael Biselx:

1. I stumbled across the ERC while I was looking for a credited semester project. I hadn’t heard of the ERC until I saw a project proposal to work on a rover… Since space is awesome and robots are awesome, of course I had to say yes to the possibility of working on a rover!
2. Besides making a bunch of unforgettable memories and a number of new friends, I was able to participate in a truly amazing project with an interdisciplinary team of (future) scientists, engineers and managers. Best of all: because the team was all students, many doing this for the first time, it was delightfully chaotic, giving us all a lot of insight into each other’s activities and struggles – invaluable experience for our future occupations in the „real world”.
3. Ideally, I would like to work in a domain where I can combine my love for robotics and all things space related. With the dawn of commercial spaceflight, many start-ups and established companies seem to be showing interest in the potential offered by space stations, Lunar and Martian bases, which will undoubtedly require extensive automation and mobile inspection and maintenance robots. That is where I hope to find a project I can contribute to!
4. We’re currently headed towards a big „space trash” crisis, which is only threatening to get worse, as more and more satellites are launched into Low Earth Orbit, with little or no end-of-life consideration. If we’re not careful, we’ll end up boxing ourselves in on our planet.

TEAM ASTRA (INDIA) – Vishal Menon:

1. Our seniors in the university have participated in the On-site edition of ERC in the previous years. Hence, we came to know about the competition from them.
2. ERC was a platform for us to delve into interstellar robotics and provided us the opportunity for all the students interested in space exploration to come together and tackle challenges which are close to what actually happens in space research and exploration.
3. I would like to work in NASA or SpaceX after graduation.

UPC SPACE PROGRAM (SPAIN) – Arnau Torrent Duch:

1. During the pandemic our team morale, cohesion and motivation was extremely low. ERC was our proposal to try and have a common goal with interesting challenges and a clear reward: going to an onsite competition to show our work.
2. A ton of experience and know-how. The team had never before designed and built a rover with all the required especifications, and now we know the challenges/issues that can come up during the process. Also, since we have a precedent, the university allows us to have a better space, and more importantly the multiple departments are much more willing to collaborate and help us.
3. My goal is to work in the space exploration industry to help further our understanding of the solar system and its planets. After graduating I’m contemplating trying to enter some of the big space agencie’s young gradates programs to be able to reach this goal.
4. I’m sure the conquest of space will face plenty of issues we can’t even imagine in the future, but a very big issue I think sadly it will become very relevant in the coming years is space debris and the over-population of some orbits around earth (especially with all these new satellite constellations being launched) leading to the increasing threat of Kessler Syndrome . I hope to be wrong, since it would mean that the earth would be practically blocked off by garbage in orbit, stealing space from us.