Project Phoenix

Fenix Rocket Team first launch

Since 2023, our team has been fully focused on one clear goal: achieving our first successful rocket launch. And there’s no better place to do it than at Europe’s biggest rocketry competition—EuRoC.

Over the past two years, we’ve worked tirelessly to overcome the challenges we faced with our first rocket. From failures to lessons learned, every experience has helped us grow. We took everything we learned from our 2022 campaign and used it to design a new, more advanced rocket, which is now being prepared for flight in the 2025 edition of EuRoC.

We’ve stuck to our original mindset of doing things ourselves—designing, building, and testing as many parts of the rocket as we can in-house. It’s not the easy way, but it’s the path that makes us better engineers and a stronger team. Every system we develop brings us one step closer to that long-awaited first launch.

Key Aspects

Propulsion system

As mentioned earlier, for this year’s competition we chose to continue developing our solid rocket motor—a system designed and simulated entirely in-house, but manufactured with the support of partnered companies.

After the motor failures we faced in 2022, propulsion became one of our top priorities. To properly size and predict the behavior of our motor, we created a mathematical model, refined through custom algorithms and supported by multiple tests. Over the last two years, the propulsion team worked hard to improve this model, narrowing the gap between theoretical predictions and real-world performance.

These efforts led to a major milestone: a successful static fire test, where the motor showed it could handle expected pressure levels, demonstrated effective thermal insulation, and—most importantly—delivered stable and consistent performance. This marks a huge step forward in our goal of achieving a safe and reliable launch.

Airframe Manufacturing

This year, the team embraced a greater challenge by choosing to build the rocket airframe in-house, rather than outsourcing it as we did in the previous edition. This decision allowed us to further develop our manufacturing and machining skills, laying the groundwork for more self-reliant and capable structural development in future projects.

The airframe is primarily constructed from composite materials. All structural tubes and the nosecone are made of carbon fiber reinforced polymer (CFRP) and glass fiber reinforced polymer (GFRP). The sections are joined using custom-designed RADAX-type connections, machined from aluminum for strength and precision.

The tubes are fabricated using a wet layup technique, with fiber layers manually wrapped over 3d printed PET-G molds. This method is cost-effective and allows for easy mold production. The nosecone is also hand-laminated, with an additional vacuum bagging step to improve fiber compaction and surface finish. It is formed over a CNC-machined SikaBlock® mold, ensuring high dimensional accuracy.

Custom-made Avionics Bay

Our team designed and developed the Avionics Bay entirely in-house. It features real-time telemetry and is responsible for controlling the rocket’s recovery system by sending electrical signals to the ejection charges. These charges ignite the igniters, which in turn deploy the parachutes.

The bay is programmed for two separate ejection stages: the first charge is triggered at apogee, deploying the drogue parachute to slow the rocket’s descent. The second charge fires at approximately 400 meters above ground, releasing the main parachute for a safe landing.