Cardiff University rocket team launch into first place for second year running
28 July 2026
After taking home the 1st place prize for their Hybrid rocket engine at Race2Space 2025, our Cardiff Rocket Labs (CRL) team won the top award in the Nitrous Bi-Propellant engine category at this year's event.
Race2Space is a prestigious, international propulsion competition designed to challenge university students to design, manufacture, and hot-fire their own rocket engines. Hosted annually, it offers student teams a rare opportunity to test their hardware on industrial-grade test stands. Out of 70 applicant teams, CRL were one of only 30 who were selected to take part.
CRL President Yusif Algurair and Chief Engineer and Propulsion Lead Oscar Mabon led a small team to develop Draig (Welsh for Dragon); Wales's first-ever regeneratively cooled liquid bi-propellant rocket engine. It is a 5kN Nitrous/IPA engine, meaning it utilizes two liquid propellants: liquid Nitrous Oxide as the oxidizer and Isopropyl Alcohol (IPA) as the fuel.
Developing an engine like Draig is a massive, long-term iterative process of constantly refining the designs, securing funding, and managing complex post-processing. We would like to say a massive thank you to the Head of Engineering, Professor Jianzhong Wu, for his incredible support of the project. His backing was instrumental in helping us get this over the line.
To design Draig, Oscar developed a custom in-house program called REDS (Rocket Engine Design Software) as his university dissertation project, which we used to generate the engine's geometry, thermal calculations, and injector design. In an exciting academic development, the work on the REDS dissertation is set to be published by the AIAA (American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics) next January in Florida.
In addition to the main prize, the team also broke 5 student records and were praised for the preparedness by competition organisers.
- Student Isp record (efficiency record) for aluminium N2O/IPA engines
- First ever Welsh regeneratively cooled engine
- Welsh thrust record
- First ever Scalmalloy™ rocket engine
- First ever aluminium engine to run to stoichiometric mixture ratio
Although both CRL founders Yusif and Oscar have graduated this year and so conclude their involvement with the project, they are leaving the team in good hands and are confident about its future.
The CRL team would also like to thank School of Engineering technicians Clive Clark and Andrew Rankmore for all their in-house manufacturing help and support, as well as Youssef Gaber and the team at Apex Additive Technologies for their Scalmalloy™ print and post-processing.
