CUSF Fire Britain's Largest Ever Nitrous Hybrid Rocket

A Pembroke student is part of the Cambridge University Spaceflight (CUSF) team that recently fired Britain's largest ever nitrous hybrid rocket engine

Matthew Coates (2015) is a fourth year engineer and led the project to create a custom hybrid rocket engine. Cambridge University spaceflight, a student society "dedicated to pushing the limits of high power rocketry and high altitude ballooning", began the project after the unfortunately explosive launch of their Martlet 3 rocket in Nevada last year. The Martlet 3 was designed to break the UK Amateur Rocketry Altitude record, but was destroyed in flight when the commercial off-the-shelf rocket motor exploded. This inspired CUSF to try and build something better. They've spent 18 months building the Pulsar engine from scratch, and successfully tested it last week.

The Pulsar engine burns Nitrous Oxide combined with High Density Polyethylene fuel to produce thrust for a total of 36 seconds. Over the course of the test, the engine produced a measured impulse of 53,855 Newton seconds giving it the largest impulse of any Nitrous Hybrid rocket ever fired in the UK.

Read more about the test here, or watch the video below