Airframe

Control Freak is a 5-inch diameter rocket developed by the Airframe team and launched at LDRS 44 in Pence, Indiana. It reached 11,512 feet, set a new club record, and marked LRI's first ever launch.

The vehicle uses canards for roll control, a composite airframe, and custom avionics. It serves as a major step in proving out the team's ability to design, manufacture, and fly a controlled high-power rocket.

Control Freak uses an active roll control system built around canards and a custom control architecture. The team uses state estimation and feedback control to determine how much correction is needed during flight.

To make that possible, we use computational fluid dynamics to understand the forces generated by the control surfaces and to size them appropriately. This lets the team connect flight controls, aerodynamics, and hardware design in a way that can actually be flown and validated.

The airframe itself is a composite vehicle built to handle the structural demands of high-power flight while staying lightweight and manufacturable. That means material selection, layup decisions, and fabrication quality all matter directly to flight performance.

Manufacturing work on the vehicle is tightly connected to the broader design process, since the team has to make sure that what is modeled and analyzed can also be built reliably in-house.

Control Freak also depends on custom avionics to handle sensing, control logic, and vehicle monitoring during flight. That avionics stack is what makes the roll control system practical instead of just theoretical.

This work gives the team experience integrating hardware, software, and flight systems into a single vehicle that can be tested under real launch conditions.