10 July 2025, 07:35 | Updated: 10 July 2025, 18:09

By Dana Arabiyat

By the time I was five years old, I was already fascinated by space. I spent hours drawing astronauts, rockets and planets.

Growing up in Jordan, I didn’t have a direct route into aerospace, but that early passion stuck with me. I joined the Jordanian Astronomical Society at 13, competed internationally at 15 with a project on space debris, and, by 17, received a NASA award for my physics-based research on laser shielding in space.

That passion eventually led me to the University of Sheffield, where I won a scholarship to study Aerospace Engineering. It was there that I first got to apply my knowledge beyond the classroom.

I was part of the Sunfire II team - a student-led project that built the UK’s first regeneratively cooled, 3D-printed student rocket engine.

We set the record for the first student-built liquid rocket engine test in the UK, but more importantly, we learned how critical hands-on experience is in this field.

Working on the combustion chamber showed me how deeply interconnected every part of a system is -........

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