The Icarus Blog

Every Friday evening, while most of our classmates are probably watching something on Netflix or heading out, six of us are cramped around a table somewhere in Luxembourg arguing about parachutes, soldering irons, and whether PLA or PETG is the better choice for a satellite chassis. This is the story of Team Icarus 6, and honestly, we still cannot quite believe it is real. We are a group of high school students from three different schools in Luxembourg: the Athénée de Luxemb

Ikarus 3.0, our final chassis design, shown assembled and ready. The white PETG version will fly on launch day. When Luka first opened Onshape to start designing the CanSat chassis, he drew a cylinder. That is it. A cylinder with a flat bottom and a lid. It looked like a trash can. It basically was a trash can. And that first design, while completely unlovable from an engineering standpoint, taught us more about mechanical design than any textbook probably could have. Designi

Our Ikarus 3.0 chassis, 3D printed in white PLA. The final flight version will be printed in PETG for better durability. When we tell people at school that we are building a satellite, we get one of two reactions. Either they assume we are joking, or they picture something massive and expensive being assembled in a clean room by rocket scientists. The truth is somewhere far more accessible and, we would argue, far more interesting. Our satellite fits inside a standard 330ml s