Sustainability not a ‘core business’

At a launch site deep in the woods of northern Sweden, a team of TU Delft students broke the European altitude record for experimental rockets: the student-designed Stratos rocket reached an altitude of 12.5 km, breaking the old record of 10.7 km, set by a British team. “We’re proud to now own the European altitude record,” said the Stratos team’s project leader, Mark Uitendaal. To break the altitude record, Stratos – a 4m-long, two-stage launcher developed by TU Delft’s Delft Aerospace Rocket Engineering student society – achieved a speed of 3,600 kmph, or four times the speed of a commercial airliner.
Elsewhere in space, the European Space Agency (ESA) successfully launched the Goce satellite on March 17, 2009. The 5m-long Goce (Gravity field and steady-state Ocean Circulation Explorer) satellite will map the Earth’s gravitational field with unprecedented accuracy, leading to new discoveries in the fields of oceanography, solid Earth physics, geodesy and sea-level research. “The launch was a big party,” said Dr Rune Floberghagen, a TU Delft alumnus and Goce mission manager. ESA’s Goce mission has its roots in TU Delft, as it was Professor Reinier Rummel, a TU Delft aerospace professor until 1992, who first initiated the plans for the research satellite.
Meanwhile, back on Earth, the credit crisis continues to crunch, although a special Dutch governmental crisis plan did not allocate extra funds for universities. The government’s 6-billion euro stimulus package does include extra funds for research, however. Over the next two years, an extra 500 million euro is earmarked for research and innovation, including strengthening the ‘knowledge infrastructure’ and the ‘timely deployment of knowledge professionals’.
The Dutch government announced it would not raise Master’s degree program tuition fees for now, although a special governmental panel proposed raising Dutch university tuition fees from 900 euro to 2,500 euro per year. If that happens, might Dutch students start studying abroad? In Belgium, most Bachelor and Master programs cost just 540 euro per year, while in Germany, universities are prohibited from charging more than 1,000 euro per year. Great Britain however remains expensive, at 3,500 euro (Bachelor) and 3,770 euro (Master). 
High costs haven’t dimmed interest in higher education: enrollment of first-year Bachelor students in Dutch universities was up by 4.4% this past year. Vrije University Amsterdam (VU) enjoyed the biggest jump, welcoming 15% more first-years (or 3,256 students), while Erasmus University Rotterdam saw its first-year enrolments drop by 5.4 percent. TU Delft however came in a strong second, with 13% more first-years, followed by Wageningen (12.3%) and Tilburg (12.1%)
With TU Delft’s student population growing, Duwo announced it would provide 400 additional student residences this year: 200 spaceboxes and 200 rooms in former social housing units. Duwo will place the 200 spaceboxes in a vacant lot on the edge of campus. According to Duwo’s housing director, Jan Willem van Beek, to cover the costs of preparing the land – gas, water and electricity – the new spaceboxes must be used for at least 10 to 12 years.

Plakkies
The Friends of the Botanical Society Foundation are worried that plans for the TU North campus could damage Delft’s botanical garden. The TU North campus plan proposes selling the Applied Physics faculty building to private developers, who will then convert the building, which borders the botanical garden, into an apartment complex. “We’re afraid the garden’s irrigation will be adversely affected if parking garages are built under the complex,” says Hans Hirs, the foundation’s secretary. “Trees could consequently dry out.” Hirs is also unhappy with the developer’s plans to build an extra wing on the building, as this wing would extend into the botanical garden.
A sandal factory that TU Delft students started in a ghetto neighborhood in South Africa has started producing trendy designer sandals made from old tires. The sandals will go on sale in stores in May. The factory – the brainchild of TU Delft aerospace engineering student Arnoud Rozendaal – provides jobs to 50 unskilled local residents, many of whom are HIV positive. The designer sandals, called ‘plakkies’, are made from old tires, which in Africa are often illegally burnt, causing severe environmental pollution.
The fire that destroyed the Bouwkunde faculty building last May was the most expensive fire in Holland in years, according to the national Union of Insurers. The faculty fire caused 140 million euro of damage, or more than the other top ten fires of 2008 combined. The second most damaging fire last year was a 35-million euro fire at a computer storage center in Venlo.
Park your bike outside the bike racks at Delft-Zuid station and you may soon be walking. As of April 3rd, the police with start cutting locks and removing bikes parked ‘illegally’ – especially those parked along the viaduct railings above the station.
Which is the worst TU Delft service center? Finance and Control (F&C) apparently, which received a grade of 6 (out of 10) in a recent quality of service survey among TU Delft employees. The online survey asked employees to rank the various TU service centers according to: opening times, telephone service, customer friendliness, problem solving, quality of communication, and timely handling of questions and complaints.
Finally, Royal Dutch Shell recently announced it would no longer invest in solar and wind energy, as neither offers the company sufficient return on investment. TU Delft however still hopes to continue collaborating with the oil giant in other research areas, like bio-fuels. Shell’s decision to pull out of this sustainable energy research came as no surprise to at least one of Shell’s partner institutes. “I perfectly understand it,” says Albert Polman, director of the Amsterdam Institute for Atomic and Molecular Physics (Amolf). “I wouldn’t do it if I were Shell, either. It’s not their core business.”