The rockets came first. The company followed in 2023.

Gabriel grew up flying with his father, and then in a flight simulator at home. The first thing he built himself was a rocket: an Estes motor, cardboard tubes, a nose cone, hand-cut fins and a parachute, assembled at a friend's house and launched from there.

The next one was printed rather than cut: a full 3D-printed PETG airframe, drawn in CAD he had taught himself building scenery objects for flight simulators. The launch failed. It had no fins.

The third design was simulated in OpenRocket before anything was built, and it targeted 3 000 m and supersonic speed: the figures Lynxrocket still carries. Finding a way to actually build it took the following year.

Lynxrocket V1 came out of that, and four iterations reached V5. V1 to V4 were static engineering prototypes and were never launched. V5 is the first of the series built to fly.

The vehicle needed a flight computer, and the boards that would do the job were priced out of reach, so Gabriel learned PCB design and started LynxYNav. The first designs were never manufactured.

He started smaller instead, with the ADC, an air data computer, and that first iteration worked. It is the board Lynxrocket V5 will carry. LynxYNav followed: V4, V5 and V6.1 were manufactured, and V6.1 is the newest and most capable.

The company was founded in 2023, two years after the first rocket, and works from Pombal. Four programmes run from there now: Lynxrocket V5, ShadowLynx, LynxYNav V6.1 and a bench wind tunnel.

Avionics bench validation and the ground test series are complete. Flight Campaign Alpha is planned for Q3-Q4 2026, and Lynxrocket V5 is set to be the first nationally built rocket flown by a Portuguese aerospace company.