Making Aerospace Accessible

I grew up liking science and technology. Building multiple science kits from a company called Clementoni, which included small projects like building your own vulkano, simple electric circuits with leds and buzzers, making crystals from Aluminum Sulfate and doing physics experiments. Building with lego or meccano, meccano was one of my favorites, it's a bit more advanced because it used bolts and nuts and more materials like metal plates, rubber tires, with more complex mechanisms. It truly showed the world of beautiful mechanical design to me. I never lost that passion when I became older.

Later I got into gaming. I mainly played clash of clans, fortnite, and minecraft. One day when I was 11, I wanted to buy a pc, I opened my dads laptop and started searching the web. But to my suprise a decent gaming pc was a bit too expensive for me. So I looked further and found out you could a pc yourself. I watched many YouTube videos, blog posts, did a lot of searching, and let me older nephew check my choices. One day later I came to my parents with my proposal to buy all the parts and build it myself.

Then I got into programming, learning a bit of python and javascript. Building my first website, back when you seperated html, css and javascript into seperate files. Then I found out about AI, machine learning and computer vision. I followed the free CS50 course, went throught an astronomy university curriculum, and watch a lot of documentaries on YouTube and Curiosity Stream. Those Curiosity Stream documentaries specifically really made me think about the universe. For the first time in my life I felt like a useless dust particle in this universe. This instilled some fear in me. It instilled anxiety in me, but at the same time peace. I didnt matter what I did, it would be useless in the grant scheme of things.

I had never felt those feeling before. I guess I just reached enough mental capacity to understand the concept of being conciousness, living on a floating sphere of water, zipping throught endless emptyness. While I thought I would be useless in life, I did understand my human nature and that I have objectives to fullfill like starting a family, inspiring others and building cool stuff. To satisfy my human/monkey brain and feel purpose.

So yeah, I've always loved building stuff, with a specific interest in space. With that vision I came to TU Delft, "Techical University of Delft". I expected to be engaged by the lectures, the people I met, and the student teams. But my expectations where wrong. I did not see that fast-paced environment I was looking for. The professors didnt teach well enough, and most importantly, didnt inspire at all. One of my courses was "project" where I expected to build stuff, and do some practical stuff, while all the other subjects were highly theoretical, but I quickly found out we wouldnt really build stuff, it was just techical writing and literature study. I quickly fell into a depressive state where for the first time in my life, I wasnt looking forward to waking up.

Luckily, around the same thime I started working on AeroVia, an online platform to make aerospace more accessible to the world. I quickly found myself working on this full-time, not going to lectures anymore. It reignited my passion again and I couldnt stop thinking about it 24/7. What new features could I add? How can I improve the user experience? What new software do I need to use? (I will do a deepdive soon). I want to make aerospace more accessible. Rightnow you either go to university or you got to find the resources to learn it yourself. I want to fix that, and give everyone the tools to do it.

I've decided to drop out of university and pursue this mission.