Phoebus team

Team photo of ESA’s Phoebus project taken at MT Aerospace in Germany with ESA, MT Aerospace and ArianeGroup personnel. Phoebus is looking to carbon fibre-reinforced plastic for the next generation of rocket fuel tanks. Carbon fibre materials have taken the world by storm as they are extremely lightweight and strong, but so far they have not been able to be made suitably leak-tight for storing liquid hydrogen, nor liquid oxygen due to its reactivity. European teams at ESA, MT Aerospace and ArianeGroup have now overcome both these limitations by using new manufacturing technologies, as well as state-of-the art design methodologies and fine-tuning the plastics chemistry.  

Phoebus is a carbon-fibre reinforced-plastic fuel tank demonstrator that is built from the ground up using layer-by-layer manufacturing. This technique and the innovative design allow engineers to construct a unique shape that suspends the fuel tank inside a supporting frame, with an insulating air gap in between, solving many of the problems above in one additive swoop. Light-weight, strong, leak-tight and non-reactive, a key element of the Phoebus project passed its test-readiness review on 17 October 2023 and was given the go-ahead to proceed for testing, where a 2-m-diameter model oxygen tank will be tested as if it were really flying.

“The physics, chemistry and construction techniques behind this project are mind-boggling,” says Kate Underhill, ESA’s lead  engineer on the project, “when we started project Phoebus, I was not even sure we would get this far and the fact we have is thanks to the huge commitment and know-how of teams involved at ESA, MT Aerospace and ArianeGroup working together as one.”