EuRoC 2026: the National Technical University of Athens team White Noise wins two awards at the European student rocket competition

Greece won two awards at this year’s pan-European student rocketry competition. The aerospace team White Noise of the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) was named “Rookie of the Year”, the best of the first-time teams, and also won the Payload Award for the best payload, instrument or experiment carried by the rocket. The Hellenic Space Center (HSC) announced the distinctions on Tuesday, October 27 and warmly congratulated the students, noting that Greek student teams in the field stand out at EuRoC and in earlier events.

The European Rocketry Challenge, known as EuRoC, is Europe’s first rocket-launch competition for university teams. It was created in 2020 by the Portuguese Space Agency (Portugal Space), which organises it in the Alentejo region. The seventh edition closed on Wednesday, October 21 in Constância, where about 700 students from universities in 13 countries shared a week between the rocket preparation area (the paddock) and the launch pads of the Santa Margarida military camp. A total of 12 rockets lifted off in four days of launches, as Portugal Space reports.

White Noise stood out thanks to an innovation of this year’s event: for the first time a Rookie category was established, with five places reserved exclusively for newcomer teams, so that students could move from months of design to a real launch. “This year’s event showed that the competition can open up to new teams without relaxing the technical standards that characterise it,” said Marta Gonçalves, head of Portugal Space’s education and science programme and one of the competition’s organisers. Among the newcomers was Portugal’s MAST of the University of Minho, whose rocket Mirage reached 3,000 metres and was recovered successfully.

The overall ranking of the EuRoC 2026 awards is as follows. The top EuRoC Award went to Austria’s Aerospace Team Graz, the Technical Award to Switzerland’s ARIS, the Design Award to Italy’s Skyward Experimental Rocketry and the Team Award to Hungary’s BME Suborbitals. In the flight awards, Aerospace Team Graz took the Flight Award Liquid 9K, Skyward the Liquid 3K, Spain’s LEEM-UPM the Solid 3K and the Czech CTU Space Research the Hybrid 3K. The categories are divided by type of propellant, liquid, solid or hybrid, and by target altitude, 3,000 or 9,000 metres.

Aerospace Team Graz’s victory has a story of its own. Its liquid-propellant rocket reached 9,000 metres with the same technology used by satellite launch vehicles. The team had won EuRoC in 2023 and 2025, and so broke the alternation of wins with Skyward, which had won in 2022 and 2024. The EuRoC Award is judged on a combination of the vehicle’s design, technical documentation, teamwork and flight performance.

For the organisers, Portugal Space president Ricardo Conde argued that the competition has become a European reference point, since young people develop technology in conditions close to those of industry, and that many of its graduates now work in companies in the sector or have founded their own. This year the European Space Agency (ESA) was a strategic partner, while the competition was supported by Neuraspace, TEKEVER and Momentum Aerospace, the Portuguese Army provided the camp for the launches and the Municipality of Constância hosted the teams.

White Noise’s distinction adds to earlier awards won by Greek student teams in the competition. In the wider field of Greek space activity, the Hellenic Space Center recently invited the public to propose a name for the mission of the first Greek astronaut to the International Space Station, while with the ERMIS-3 satellite Greece achieved its first laser optical link with a low-orbit satellite.