Project Fornax
2022 - 2025
Project Fornax was the planned third rocket by DanSTAR. It iterated on all the previously established systems and greatly improved the designs of the recovery system, electronics, airframe, software, and overall aerodynamics.
The project was officially ended in late 2025 to make way for Project Parhelion.
The Rocket
The rocket was designed for nitrous oxide (N2O) as oxidizer and a fuel mixture of 89 wt% isopropyl alcohol (IPA), 10 wt% water and 1 wt% tetraethyl orthosilicate (TEOS). The propellant tank was previously used in and salvaged the Valkyrie rocket.
The outer shell of the rocket consisted of five large panels in carbon and glass fibre, two of which were chosen to be as aerodynamic as possible whilst keeping the structural advantage of a tube in comparison to cut-up panels. The airframe consists of three longitudinal aluminium rails being held together by 13 bands across the rails.
Rocket Flight Computer
The “brain” of the rocket – the flight computer – consisted of a backplane with five slot-in boards, each of which had unique jobs to control and monitor the entire rocket. Besides the custom flight computer, we designed battery boards to monitor and charge the battery, a switch board to easily turn off power, a black box to store the valuable flight data, and a middleman board to take the outputs (pyro channels) of both of the COTS flight computers to deploy the recovery system. We used two COTS computers to ensure deployment of the parachutes.
Contact
Delivery address:
Diplomvej, Bygning 373D, 2800 Kgs. Lyngby
Registry address:
Fysikvej Bygning 311 2800 Kgs. Lyngby
CVR-nr.:
38217216
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