Each year, Imperial College London Rocketry builds on lessons learned to innovate new rocket designs to compete at EuRoC. This year their goal is to break the European student liquid altitude record in 2025.
Hands-on learning with Autodesk Fusion provides the opportunity for real-world engineering experience.
Working as a team and gaining both hard and soft skills help Imperial College London students prepare and stand out for their future careers.
Space is the final frontier—and it's also the ultimate goal for Imperial College London Rocketry (ICLR).
Each year, a team of 100 students design and make a brand-new, high-powered rocket from scratch to compete at EuRoC, the European Rocketry Challenge in Portugal. No two rockets are the same, and every competition entry is a product of lessons learned from the last. From off-the-shelf components in the early days to now building custom liquid-fueled propulsion systems, the club’s evolution is getting them one step closer to reaching space.
Of course, the journey itself has been filled with highs and lows, discovering how to “fail fast” and pivot. After setbacks, the team completed their most successful mission yet with Nimbus 24, earning second place in the payload, flight performance, and team effort categories at EuRoC 2024.
“Last year, the launch was all that we’d hope for,” says Pablo Duhamel, Airframe and Recovery Team Lead, ICLR. “It was a massive success for the team and everyone involved. What we have achieved as a small group of students is incredible and a true testament to the engineering talent in the UK.”
For the upcoming competition in October 2025, ICLR’s new rocket is an ambitious leap in both scale and performance to achieve the team's bold goals of full mission success from start to finish and to break the European student liquid altitude record.
The latest iteration called Pluto is a liquid bi-propellant vehicle designed to reach nine kilometers in altitude which is just under the altitude airliners fly and a dramatic increase from the team’s previous three-kilometer targets. The rocket builds on the framework of their most recent design but features significantly larger tanks, a more powerful propulsion system, and a stiffer airframe engineered to handle the increased structural loads of high-altitude flight. But, for Duhamel, there’s more to the club than successfully launching the rocket.
“Our main mission is to prepare students for a career in the aerospace industry and get hands-on experience of engineering,” he says. “It may seem counterintuitive, but we don’t get a lot of that in our course because the degree is more theoretical. We can design parts, get them manufactured, assemble them, and see a rocket launch at the end of the day. These are crucial skills the industry is looking for, and we can plug in that hole in terms of knowledge and application of skills.”
Duhamel believes ICLR also represents learning more than just the technical side. It’s community, passion, and a launchpad—literally and figuratively. “It’s like a second family,” he says. “You’re all passionate about the same thing, and it really creates a sense of community. There’s nothing like all of us coming together to see the rocket launch into the sky.”
ICLR is bringing their latest design to life with Autodesk Fusion. The support of Autodesk and free access to the software is a critical component to the team’s success and the backbone for their design and manufacturing process. With multiple sub-teams working on propulsion systems, PCBs, flight dynamics, recovery, and payloads, Fusion’s cloud-based collaboration tools have become essential.
“One of the best parts of using Fusion is collaboration,” Duhamel says. “You can open someone else’s file at any time, pick up where they left off, or review the full rocket assembly—even when it’s being worked on by 50 different people. That alone saves us a huge amount of time.”
The team also uses generative design in Fusion to create highly optimized components, most notably a part called the engine truss to transfer the engine’s thrust to the airframe. By inputting load conditions and constraints, they can determine a lightweight, structurally sound design that would be difficult to achieve manually.
“Fusion is important for us to use because it’s intuitive, accessible, and collaborative,” Duhamel says. “It gives us the tools to take things from concept to reality, whether it’s stress-testing a component, simulating designs, designing electronics, or using generative design. That makes a huge difference for a student team building complex systems like rockets.”
The entire experience of ICLR doesn’t only lend itself to designing rockets for competition. It helps students prepare for their future careers. Duhamel’s advice for other students? Don’t skip the opportunity of hands-on learning with Fusion and joining a team of passionate, like-minded people.
“All of these skills you learn using Fusion combined with the soft skills gained by working with a big team toward a common goal sets you miles apart from anyone that just sticks to the regular courses,” Duhamel says. “This is great not only for your CV, but also for your career. Even if a company is using another software, the skills can easily be transferred from Fusion to another CAD package.”
Last year, Duhamel completed an internship with a Formula 1 racing team. After graduation, he is headed for an energy startup focused on developing synthetic fuels. From rockets to race cars and now energy alternatives, Duhamel is ready on day one to lead positive change and impact. “It's incredibly exciting to work on technology that could change the world,” he says.
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