Roughly 70 percent of DARE members come from the Faculty of Aerospace Engineering at TU Delft. The other 30 percent are mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, applied physicists, and industrial designers. About half come from outside the Netherlands. They build everything in-house: engines, electronics, parachutes, ground systems. The Solid Six team handles solid-propellant motors using either rocket candy (sorbitol and potassium nitrate) or a denser mix called Alan-7 (ammonium nitrate and aluminum), with thrust ranging from 300 to 7,000 newtons. The hybrid team, organized as Project Chimera, runs nitrous-oxide oxidizer against a fuel grain mixing sorbitol, paraffin, and aluminum. The liquid team works on a 2-to-3-kilonewton LOX-ethanol engine, and a separate effort, Project Sparrow, is developing a thrust-vectoring liquid engine named Firebolt aimed eventually at sending the first student-designed rocket into orbit. The Safety Board oversees all of it. Members earn seats on the board only after a minimum of one year's training. They can overrule any safety-related decision.

Stratos I launched from Esrange in northern Sweden in 2009. It was a two-stage solid rocket with boosters designed and built by students, and it reached 12.5 kilometers, setting the European altitude record for amateur rocketry. The flight was successful all the way to apogee; only the parachute deployment failed. Both stages came down hard. The second stage was recovered using telemetry data from the launch range. The first stayed buried in the tundra for eight years before someone stumbled on it. The launch range's tracking systems gave the team the data they needed to claim the record and the rough location of the impact, so the second stage came back fairly quickly. The first stage stayed buried in the tundra for eight years before someone stumbled on it. After Stratos I, the team turned to hybrid propulsion, eventually producing the 8-kilonewton DHX-200 Aurora engine.

Stratos II+ was meant to reach 50 kilometers. As the design matured and the simulations sharpened, the team accepted that it wouldn't. They flew it anyway. After a scrubbed campaign in October 2014, the rocket launched from El Arenosillo near Seville, Spain on 16 October 2015 and reached 21.5 kilometers, breaking the previous European student altitude record. The DHX-200 Aurora generated 11 kilonewtons of peak thrust, burning for 23 seconds with a total impulse of 180 kilonewton-seconds. The rocket carried payloads from outside collaborators: a radio-astronomy experiment from Radboud University Nijmegen, a camera-and-video-link package from the company DelftDynamics, and a Geiger counter from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences' Centre for Energy Research. Telemetry from all of it came back successfully. The record held for a few years until a German team, HyEnD, took it.

Stratos III was designed to take the record back. Eight point two meters tall, powered by the DHX-400 Nimbus, an engine that produced 360 kilonewton-seconds of total impulse and 25 kilonewtons of peak thrust, the most powerful amateur-built hybrid engine in the world. Nitrous oxide oxidizer, the same paraffin-sorbitol-aluminum fuel mixture, a carbon-fiber oxidizer tank with aluminum liner storing 174 kilograms of nitrous at 60 bar. The launch window opened on 16 July 2018 at El Arenosillo. The second attempt, on 26 July, had 100 percent weather-go but suffered a delay while pressurizing the oxidizer tank. The rocket lifted off at 3:30 in the morning. Twenty seconds into the flight, an anomaly destroyed the vehicle. The cause, the investigation eventually concluded, was roll-pitch coupling: a phenomenon in which the roll rate of the rocket matches its natural pitch frequency, drives the vehicle into conical motion, and tears it apart. Telemetry from the IMUs, GPS, and pressure sensors during those 20 seconds let the team reconstruct exactly what had happened.

What followed was Stratos IV, unveiled on 12 February 2019, designed to reach 100 kilometers and cross the Kármán line. The team kept the engine geometry that had taken three years to develop and went to war with the vehicle's mass. A composite combustion chamber saved six kilograms over aluminum. A Twaron nosecone saved two. A 3D-printed titanium nozzle saved twelve. Conical interfaces between modules made the airframe more rigid than the old flat ones. Larger fins kept the static margin more consistent. A roll-control module using nitrous-oxide thrusters tackled the coupling problem directly. Five cameras documented everything. The launch campaign in late 2021 at El Arenosillo never put the rocket into the sky. After repeated technical issues with ground systems, the campaign ended. Stratos V is now in development, built around the Firebolt engine that Project Sparrow has been perfecting. The long target is still orbit. The smaller target, more immediate, is a launch days for first-year members in the dunes near 't Harde where DARE flies its small egg-carrying rockets up to about two kilometers. The Small Rocket Project, known affectionately as the Scrambled Eggs Competition, sends an uncooked egg up a kilometer in the rocket and rewards anyone who gets it back intact. Some DARE alumni have gone on to found companies like Dawn Aerospace and T-Minus. Many of them say their rocket-club experience exceeded what they later did in graduate school. The clubhouse is still on the TU Delft campus, in the Aircraft Hall of the Faculty of Aerospace Engineering. The egg-carrying rockets still fly.