Aerospace student Camal Tahireddine and Team Tumbleweed have their sights set on Mars. What is his mission?
(Photo: Heather Montague)
“I’m from Luxembourg, but my origins are from Morocco. I’m in my first year studying aerospace engineering. I asked my school counsellor about places to study something to do with space and that’s how I learned about TU Delft. I fell in love with aerospace engineering because it combines engineering and space, which are my two favourite things.
Team Tumbleweed started in 2017 with three Viennese students but I just joined this year. I applied and got accepted as communications coordinator, so I’m responsible for everything that’s related to talking to companies about getting funding or finding applicants to join us. Team Tumbleweed has the mission of getting Mars rovers built and sent to Mars in the next decade. Our main goal is to make them as cheap as possible, as environmentally friendly as possible and as efficient as possible. It’s a wind driven rover so there is no complex machinery; it’s actually quite simple.
‘It’s growing like crazy’
We are quite a young company. The team was previously a student association, but as of 2020 we are now actually a company. Here at TU Delft we already have 20 members and we have some in the USA and other countries. It’s growing like crazy. We have over 40 members in total, with everything from first year to master’s students.
Part of my job is to find new applicants and right now we’re accepting applications until the end of January. We’re specifically looking for people with a spark, an interest to actually move something like this forward. We’re not so focused on technical abilities because you can learn those. We study here at TU Delft with books, but Team Tumbleweed is actually giving me an opportunity to learn what it’s like in businesses. You get to learn things like how to collaborate and how to deal with things in the real world.
In aerospace engineering we sometimes have over 30 hours a week of lectures, without even considering the studying. But this project is not a burden at all. It’s quite closely related to what I’m studying, but it also has the fun part, the active part, the applied part of learning.”
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Heather Montague / Freelance writer
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