What's weird about student/amateur rocketry is how, at a certain point, knowledgeable people have to say "I'm not allowed to help you." If you get too good at this hobby you run straight into arms treaties.
If college kids can do it, there's no knowledge that terrorists in even backwater shitholes (a lot of al-qaeda were engineers by training) can't quickly obtain. We might as well drop the pretense that the knowledge itself is something so valuable to building weapons that speaking it to foreigners should be illegal
Iran/China/Russia all have more advanced missiles than the US has deployed like, ever. Iran and Russia have demonstrated recently hypersonics that are effectively unblockable.
What kind of knowledge do these arms export controls really do other than make it more difficult to compete with defense contractors?
This is somewhat true for China's, on paper at least. Maybe.
Russia's Kinzhals got intercepted by 1980s Patriots.
Iran's are just boring old ballistic missiles.
> Iran and Russia have demonstrated recently hypersonics that are effectively unblockable.
The US has plenty of similar ballistic missiles; ATACMS is similarly tough to intercept. Doubly so in large numbers, which was how Iran got some through.
I think the same could likely be said for this kind of production of rocketry.
For another example, consider how Russia had to rely on Iran for the production of their Shahed drones (until Iran showed them how to produce them), despite Russia being a longtime producer of weaponry.
The Shaheds are probably most useful not for advanced tech (they aren’t!) but for the ability to produce them while under global sanctions.
Such sanctions are new to Russia, but Iran had a decade or two to figure out how to evade them.
I think this particular engineering department has a very exceptional group of college kids. I don't hear much about students in other schools in other states much less other countries accomplishing near this much. I know "American Exceptionalism" probably is not a view that HN audience would give much merit to, but we are still one of the only places in the world where smart students are given opportunities like this. Our culture seemed to give "opportunity" a good balance (even when we see the many downfalls, ie the entire crypto space)
If you are buying your propellant components in small bags off the internet and mixing it yourself in stand mixers and casting it yourself in your garage and using niche open market servos to build your stuff with homemade guidance, the gov is not looking at you. ITAR isn't about keeping every precocious kid from building small volume guided munitions; It's about keeping shithole states from building ICBMs. It's about keeping former SpaceX personnel from spending time in Best Korea.
This is especially true in a post FPV drone world, where putting 1kg of explosive anywhere you want in a 10km radius is a $500 purchase off alibaba. Precision munitions have accidentally been democratized.