DARE was founded in 2001 by six students as a committee of the study association VSV Leonardo da Vinci of the Faculty of Aerospace Engineering on the TU Delft.

2009 marked DARE's Stratos I launch, which set the European altitude record of 12.5 km for student rockets.

This engine powered Stratos II, which after a failed launch campaign in 2014 broke the European altitude record for student rocketry in 2015.

DARE typically conducts two to four launch days each year for small scale rockets that go up to a maximum of two kilometers altitude.

The other location is the Science Center Delft, where meetings and lectures from more experienced members take place.

DARE has a number of teams working on specific areas of rocket technology, logistics, promotion and sponsor acquisition.

After extensive theoretical research, small scale testing (ranging from 500 to 1100 N) commenced to gain experience with the system and to select the optimal engine configuration.

For this reason, the development of LOX - Ethanol Liquid rocket engines is tackled within DARE.

Past liquid engine developments have failed for a variety of reasons, but most prominently due to the mechanical complexity of this type of propulsion.

The Small Rocket Project (colloquially known as the Scrambled Eggs Competition) is DARE's program to introduce first year members and other interested students to the basic principles of hands-on rocketry.

To help students achieve this goal the project starts out with several lectures explaining the fundamentals of rocketry, rocket stability and the design of parachutes.

Over the years these launcher have undergone several development iterations, balancing reliability, producibility, and payload capacity.

The current CSL Version 7 consists of an all-Aluminium frame and, propelled by a solid rocket motor, can lift about five to six CanSats to an altitude of one kilometer.

It focusses on demonstrating several new technologies developed within DARE, that can later on be implemented in larger projects.

Project Sparrow is the newest initiative of DARE, towards building the society’s first liquid-propelled, thrust-vectoring rocket engine, which will be named Firebolt.

It shall provide the required power and control using a LOX – Ethanol engine, to build rockets that go beyond the 100 km Kármán line.

Stratos II+ was successfully launched on 16 October 2015 from El Arenosillo of Instituto Nacional de Técnica Aeroespacial, close to the city of Sevilla in Spain.

Among these are an experiment on radio astronomy from the Radboud University Nijmegen,[12] a camera system with video link from the company DelftDynamics[13][14] and a geiger counter from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences' Centre for Energy research.

The project started in 2016 as a successor of the Stratos II+ mission with the purpose of reclaiming the European altitude record for student rocketry, currently owned by the German team HyEnD.

[16] The rocket carries a scientific payload from NLR, which is a prototype IMU for the proposed future European SMILE launcher.

[18] After the in-flight disintegration of Stratos III, an investigation was begun to determine the cause of the vehicles demise.

The main sources of information were the telemetry streamed back from the vehicle during its 20 seconds of flight (giving data from the two IMUs onboard as well as the GPS receiver and pressure sensors), as well as the ground measurements taken using radar and Doppler.

Thus the Stratos IV project is focusing on minimizing the mass of the vehicle, while keeping the internal engine geometry, which took three years to develop, fixed.