Wolfworks Experimental
2025-2026
Mach-et
Machet is the first submin diameter rocket our club has made. The goal of it is to reach Mach 3 with an apogee of just under 17k feet. In order to gain more room for our avionics and parachutes without hurting the drag & weight, it features a very long nosecone with a 10:1 ratio.
Project FIRM
Project FIRM (Filtered Inertial Rotation Module) is a multifaceted solution to address pain points in payload development and airbrake development. It is a custom-designed PCB with hand-picked sensors to perform data collection during rocket flights and process the data through a Kalman Filter for high accuracy.
FIRM has expanded the club’s knowledge in both practical hardware design and robust software practices, with the intended goal of being a reliable and reusable module that can be inserted into any rocket for a variety of payload missions. You can read more about FIRM here. You can also view the PCB design and software on our GitHub.
2024-2025
Barbenheimer
Barbenheimer was the club’s first-ever two-stage. The rocket was constructed entirely from custom-made composite tubes that we laid up ourselves. In its original flight configuration, it was projected to go almost 6000 ft under the power of both stages. Barbenheimer had a total of three launches:
- First Launch (Fall 2024): This launch would fly both stages but only ignite the booster. We intentionally didn’t light the sustainer since we wanted to test the rocket with a single motor to prove that it would fly and recover safely.
- Second Launch (Spring 2025): We attempted to light both motors, but the sustainer motor did not light because the tilt angle off the pad was beyond the safety limits that we had set in the flight computer. The rocket was recovered safely and shelved
- Third Launch (Fall 2025): We again attempted to ignite both motors, but this time we had safely increased the tilt limit by a small amount. Unfortunately, Barbenheimer left the pad at an extremely steep angle and once again did not light the second stage. Both stages of the rocket only reached an apogee of approximately 800 feet on this final flight. Due to the extremely low apogee, the drogue and main parachute events happened almost simultaneously, and both stages hit the ground hard before the main parachutes could fully slow them for landing. After analyzing the damage to the booster, it was determined that Barbenheimer would be grounded permanently.
We plan to improve upon Barbenheimer by designing and building a new two-stage that will have a much greater thrust-to-weight ratio, and revise many of the issues that Barbenheimer had.
Squakit
Squakit was one of our first attempts at making a custom composite airframe. We wrapped fiberglass around a cardboard shipping container and painted it like a creeper from Minecraft. We launched it successfully during the 2024 and 2025 interest launches. Squakit taught us about how to roll fiberglass tubes and some creative sealing methods.
2023-2024
Pencil Pusher
Pencil Pusher was the first supersonic rocket we made, built with a fiberglass airframe and carbon fiber-reinforced sandwich composite fins with a birch core. It included a custom telemetry system and flew successfully to Mach 1.4 in 2023 and Mach 2.0 in 2024 with apogee around 10k and 15k feet, respectively.
Rover
In Spring 2023, the WolfWorks Experimental team designed, built, tested, and flew a fully 3D-printed rover. Made out of CF-PETG material, the rover was designed to drive on the farm we launch at in Grantsboro, NC. It contains 2 continuous servo motors, 5 positional servos, an ultrasonic sensor, buck converters, an Arduino Uno, and a LiPo battery. The body was designed to just fit inside a 6″ diameter body tube to maximize internal space for electronics, with wheels that can expand an additional 3″ dia. for easier traversal of rough terrain. It has a parachute release mechanism to avoid parachute entanglement as well as driving stabilizers. You can read more about it here.