Commercial off-the-shelf propulsion systems for CubeSats are generally expensive and bulky. This limits their use by organisations that are interested to deploy CubeSats for research and non-commercial purposes. Moreover, they have limited capabilities and are difficult to tailor for specific missions.

As such, there is ongoing research in NUS to explore the use of additive manufacturing to produce cost effective and accessible propulsion systems for CubeSats. One such example is the CRADLE-M3. It has a small 1U form factor, is made of Ti6Al4V Grade 23 titanium alloy, and fabricated using powder bed fusion and direct metal laser sintering.

The objective of this project is to validate the thrust produced by CRADLE-M3 under space conditions. We designed a vacuum chamber to mimic space conditions, and used angular displacement of a momentum trap to obtain the thrust produced by the propulsion system.