Project Phoenix
RUBI 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.
recovery system
The recovery subsystem is responsible for ensuring the safe return of the rocket to the ground after flight. The system is designed with two parachutes: a drogue and a main, enabling a controlled descent in two distinct phases. During the first ejection event, the drogue parachute is deployed using a CO₂ ejection system, providing initial stabilization and reducing the rocket’s velocity during descent. The nose cone is secured with shear pins, which maintain structural integrity during ascent and allow controlled separation at the appropriate moment.
In the second ejection event, the drogue mechanically extracts the main parachute, significantly reducing the descent rate before landing. This approach minimizes structural loads and increases overall system safety.
Several tests were conducted to validate the subsystem’s performance and confirm the reliability of the ejection mechanisms.
In future projects, the goal is to further improve the recovery subsystem, making it more efficient, more reliable, and less dependent on pyrotechnic systems.