2023 – 2025
Won the Young Searchers Prize at the 2023 Project X engineering competition with a space probe design concept. Repeated the win in 2024 with a Zero-G experiment design, and was selected to present awards at the 2025 closing ceremony.
The Problem
Project X is a national engineering competition in Tunisia that challenges student teams to tackle a new technical theme each year and present a fully developed engineering concept to a jury of industry experts and academics. The competition demands both technical depth and the ability to communicate ideas clearly under pressure — skills that are rare at the student level.
Our team entered three consecutive years, each time with a different theme and a different design challenge. The question each year was the same: can we out-engineer and out-present every other team in the country?
Goals
Develop a rigorous engineering concept that addresses the yearly competition theme
Present a technically credible and well-communicated proposal to a jury of experts
Win the Young Searchers Prize — the top award at Project X
Build on each year's experience to deepen the technical quality of successive entries
My Role
I led the technical development and the presentation strategy for our team across all three years. In 2023, I drove the space probe concept — defining the mission architecture, the systems breakdown, and the key engineering trades. In 2024, I built on the CNES Zero-G experience to develop our microgravity experiment design, bringing real flight data into the competition context.
In both winning years, I led the final jury presentation. In 2025, I was invited back to present the awards at the closing ceremony — recognizing the team's three-year run.
The Process
The 2023 theme called for an innovative space exploration concept. Our team designed a compact space probe with a defined mission profile, instrument suite, and trajectory plan. I developed the systems architecture, performed the mass and power budget, and led the jury presentation. We won the Young Searchers Prize.
For 2024, the theme aligned with our CNES experience. We designed a suite of microgravity experiments with real scientific objectives, drawing on the lessons and data from the parabolic flight campaign. The proposal included detailed experiment hardware designs and expected results. We won for the second consecutive year.
In 2025, having won the award two years in a row, I was selected by the organizers to present the awards at the Project X closing ceremony — acknowledging the team's consistency and impact on the competition.
Outcome & Results
Three consecutive years of recognition at Project X — two first-place wins (2023, 2024) and a closing ceremony invitation in 2025. Beyond the awards, the competition sharpened our ability to develop engineering concepts under tight constraints, communicate complex ideas to expert audiences, and iterate rapidly on feedback.
The 2024 win was especially meaningful because it connected directly to real experimental work — the proposal was grounded in data and experience from the CNES Zero-G campaign, not just theory.