How to launch and land a model Falcon Heavy - Orbit 12.05

Hello everyone and welcome to Tomorrow Space Orbit 12.05. We're very excited for you to be here today because we have a very cool guest with Joe Bernard from BPS Space showing you some of the wild things that he is doing in the world of amateur rocketry. So once again this is Tomorrow Orbit 12.05. And I am Jared Head, the host for today. You probably know me as the resident astronomer of Tomorrow. And right next to me I've got Sarah Vincent who, what are we calling you today? Insert nickname here. You pick. Okay. What do I do? What am I? Yes. We can bring it up to a community vote. We can do that. I'm up for that. And we do most everything with community votes. Sarah Face would be hilarious. Okay. I'm just putting that out there. Sounds good. Sounds like a good new Twitter handle if you need it. And then we have Athena. Athena, how the heck did you say your last name? Brenzberger. Brenzberger. So Athena Brenzberger and you are like our resident super like super stellar explosion expert here. Yes. So excellent stuff. I love it. And then all the way on the end as we mentioned in our intro we have Joe Bernard from BPS Space today. And we're very excited to have you on the show here. I know I'm excited because I'm an amateur rocketeer myself and some of us here are amateur rocketeers. So I guess just to kind of start out a little bit, just kind of give us a little bit of background about yourself and maybe how you kind of got involved in rocketry. Yeah. So my name is Joe Bernard, like you said. I run this company called BPS.space or BPS Space. I don't really know like what to call it. That's the website though and also the name. Anyway, we build these really advanced metal rocketry components. And I kind of just like I want to see how crazy advanced you can make these small scale rockets. A lot of times when rocketeers want to build like bigger things, you're an amateur rocketeer. Yes. Bigger is better. Well yeah. So that's like the common view that like a lot of people take. And actually in a lot of ways bigger is better. But you can also get really advanced at the model scale. If you start incorporating like guidance systems and things like that into your low power rockets, you can stay really safe and still learn a ton about how the real things get to orbit or get to wherever. So that's kind of what we do. I'm all self-taught in it. So it's like kind of also a journey of like how much can I not mess up on like my path through learning this. But yeah that's that's about it. I studied I studied music and then I saw what SpaceX was doing in 2015 and it was like uh-oh I picked the wrong career. Yeah. So then I picked up a bunch of textbooks and I just like got to work. So you literally just like dive in the textbooks and that's how you learn physics behind all of this. It's also crazy like it sounds like a joke but for real there are a lot of YouTube tutorials that like work pretty well. Oh yeah. Excellent. So with this did you also have to learn how to kind of like work with the hardware that came with it as well? Yep. So I'm not a mechanical engineer. I mean at this point maybe but like I wasn't. And so I bought a 3D printer. I got like some CAD software. It's like you know computer-aided design. And again like YouTube tutorials get you started pretty well and then you just sort of try things. Especially with like a 3D printer you can iterate so many times like you know print seven versions of the same part in the same day and basically just like make it a little better each time. So it's it's really forgiving if you're not a good engineer to start. Yeah yeah 3D printing you know rapid prototyping that's like you could do tweaks on the fly if you need to. Yeah and we see this in like all of the real aerospace companies too. They're moving all of their stuff to Inconel or whatever it is that they're 3D printing for some of the more complex parts or just to do rapid iteration on their design. So when you got into rocketry were you really like looking to push the boundaries of what amateur rocketry could do or did or did you just did you just like one day go like hmm you know what you know kind of like that kind of a moment? No definitely definitely not. The way that it started is so I mentioned I saw this I saw this video it was specifically the F9 Dev R test. One of the ones in McGregor goes up to like you know a thousand meters comes back down and I saw a video of this on Facebook. I was like uh-oh that yeah that's the uh-oh I picked the wrong career moment. I kind of figured like I wanted a job with these people and I knew that like I couldn't show up with a music degree and ask for a job like I wouldn't be taken seriously and rightfully so. So I had to demonstrate it in some other way or I had to go back to engineering school and that second option is really expensive takes a long time and it was a literal shower idea where I thought maybe like I knew that Arduino existed that all of this like open source coding existed I knew that you could get into 3d printing and like print a bunch of parts there were lots of different rocket engines and rocket parts available and I figured if I worked hard enough I could probably like try to launch and land a Falcon 9 replica and that would be enough where I could like tweet it. I didn't really think of the logistics here but like I could like tweet it to SpaceX or something and see if they would say hey do you want an interview. So that's how it got started. It's mostly I just I just wanted a job in the aerospace industry and it's something much different now it's I just like along the way I've realized I just find this stuff so fulfilling and I love sharing what I've learned online even when it doesn't work like you end up getting a lot of good feedback and becoming a better engineer but that's what I do yeah yeah that's so cool yeah we actually have a question from the chat um it's from Gregorius Sotaharmel from uh YouTube and they ask what is the limit on guidance before it became illegal? Man that's a that's actually my question. There's sort of the joke in the amateur rocketry community that you know you really can't put guidance on it because once you put guidance on a rocket it becomes a missile and the United States government isn't a big fan of people who aren't the United States government getting missiles. Yeah I honestly I don't know why because it's like you deal with like legalities but I love talking about this um so there are basically there are like three regulations that you want to pay attention to in rocketry um the first one is FAA part 101 which deals with model rockets and that different there are different classifications of vehicles and none of it mentions active guidance or active control the second one is the national association of model rocketry as a safety code again there's no mention of active guidance or control and the third one is another organization uh Tripoli and they don't mention active guidance or control anyway so there aren't actually I have to be careful about this there aren't actually like the part that you get because you can get in trouble for this stuff but the way that you get in trouble is by um usually by exporting it or um sharing enough of your information and so actually you see a lot of university teams um with really high powered vehicles steering away from this stuff and usually for good reason because export controls regulations this is like ITAR or the USML um these things deal with the sharing of information as well as the sharing of hardware or software so what's USML uh USML is basically the same as ITAR that's the United States munitions list okay um if you want to read it it's it's like I don't know several hundred pages of just really confusing words but anyway yeah so it is uh it's generally and then the other thing is there is some gray area in this too um but if I think generally if you're doing it with good intent and if you're not strapping any type of oh oh I didn't differentiate guidance by the way so my rockets have stability and not guidance and the difference between the two is stability just tries to keep the rocket upright it's doing the exact same job as a fins on as a set of fins on model rockets would right so you're just trying to make sure it stays straight up in the air right and guidance would be maneuvering um in reference to some point in the real world so like you're trying to I mean you shouldn't do this but like you're trying to hit a point or you're trying to land on a point you know like if you're landing a model rocket but mine just have stability so they try to maintain upright uh maintain stability oh okay yeah got it stability is a lot more safe um legality wise than guidances and I think things get a little bit more tricky there yeah because then it's on the lines of possibly being more like a missile if it actually has guidance right that's when it can direct like you were saying yeah I think there may be like I think there's some there's some amount of um scale that gets into this too if you build something that's guided that weighs um I don't know like a half a kilogram it's probably not going to be an issue if you're building at like something that's like 20 kilograms you're going to probably get some calls about that got it yeah just a little bit so um because yeah 20 kilograms moving really fast is quite energetic yeah yeah it's tough though there's there there is some gray area in it I just generally speaking though there's actually a lot of information about this on the bps.space website the about section I have lots of there's resources for like the legality around this stuff um but yeah you generally want to stick to stability instead of guidance gotcha wow so what were those first like what was what were you doing at first with your rockets to develop the stability with them um like the first test flights yeah what was that like like because you're I mean you're putting all this together and you're all self-taught about that so what like what's happening during this early time frame with your flights yeah um so the schedule the schedule for most of this stuff is like you wake up you go to starbucks for three hours read rocket propulsion elements by george sutton this is like this is like the the bible of aerospace engineering but um yeah so it's just a lot of that then you go home and I basically built like a rigid schedule of like making sure I was focusing on the uh on all of the different aspects of this so you have like mechanical engineering you have um electronic or electrical engineering that's like your wiring you have um software design things like that but these first test flights the first test flights were like awful um the first one the first one was like a really obvious error that if you if you showed it to anyone without any further results they'd be like yeah you're never gonna make this work like if you if you did if you made an error like that silly it just won't work at all um and actually that was like the first 10 flights or so were pretty bad there was like one that was really lucky to have looked really good on camera um but it was for real just because of like the angle of the camera yeah I mean they were all bad and so you learn a little bit more every time you you look at the flight data you look at um actually one of the benefits here so um I mentioned off air but on air basically I was a videographer um as I was learning these things so especially with shooting weddings you work a lot on the weekend and then during the week you just spend a lot of time at starbucks reading books um but yeah um because I was a videographer I had access to all of these nice cameras there was like the company I worked for had a red camera and we were able to shoot a lot of high speed footage to so that I could quickly diagnose after a test flight what was actually going on on the vehicle in addition to the flight data um so this is again this is like 3d printing it's the iterative design um if you can afford to just go through a little bit of frustration it's a really fast way to like get things moving yeah and was there a certain kind of regime with your flight testing that you were working within it changed a few times um the first few okay yeah yeah it changed a few times because the first series of vehicles were called the scout rocket they were actually dog themed um the scout rocket it's like scouts kind of a dog name the computer's name was uh fetch the launch pad the launch pad software was throw so when when you first started like your first launch attempts was it all stuff you made or did you go to wow you just started from scratch because I mean you're now your company now provides what other people can buy but you didn't have access to you yeah no I did not have access to future future joe I wish I did it would have been a lot easier um but yeah so you go through a lot of like a lot of garbage designs um a lot of silly errors um you end up with a lot of those too like it happens you neglect to check a wire that's stuck in some mechanical connection always you um you do some testing on some code and you have a bunch of it commented out and then you show up at the launch pad and you haven't pre-uploaded the new version or whatever so um yeah the first you asked about the like the flight objectives or like the um what are your like parameters you're working with so um the first few flights were of the scout vehicle like I mentioned and the goal was just to launch and land in the same flight all up like with no experience doing it which as you can imagine doesn't really work so well and you end up smashing a lot of rockets that you've put a lot of work into so um after about a year of that um I had spent enough money and enough time where I was like this is not working we need to switch to something different so I built a new rocket called Echo um and a lot of these are just aesthetic changes they use a lot of the same flight computers and components but the new rocket was um like the airframe was much more stable I basically built it so that if it hit the ground like really hard if it didn't deploy any parachutes and just free-falled right into the ground it would still be okay to fly in like a day um and that helped a lot that helped like really speed up the um time between launches so Echo was like a new not like mission objective but like test profile I guess so reusability is key reusability is key it is I love how much experimentation was done and that you do mention that a lot and I think actually on your website there there's a line that's my favorite it talks about how experimentation is really the way to you know start to achieve these things so I have a really awesome question from the chat um from Jaken from YouTube and they ask about actually the fact that you have kits they say yeah um are we going to ever do model rocket competitions in school and what do you think what type should we build water rocket or solid fuel and I think that's super important that you know your kids bring experimentations to to people so what are your thoughts on that yeah I mean definitely I think I think model rocket competitions are awesome um I actually I've had it in my mind to like start one um a couple of times but it's a it's like a non-trivial amount of work um yeah but I think the other thing I mentioned on the website whether I mentioned it or not this is just how I feel about it but like experimentation is the way that I learn best um I don't think everyone does but just being able to have hands-on tools like a regular model rocket a water rocket doesn't even matter um something that can something that you can like actually play with or work with to help you gain an understanding of a new concept or of a new thing that you're learning is just crazy helpful um at least for me I found that the only way I'm able to really learn something like until I actually interact with it in the physical world I haven't really understood what's going on right yeah exactly so I think I think competitions like that um or just any incentive to get kids to like play with model rockets or play with any engineering thing like I did um first robotics in high school you know massive robotics competition and it for myself and for all of my friends who are involved it was just a huge it's like so important to fostering that um like innate desire that a lot of us have to build things or to experiment yeah yeah well speaking actually of experiments really another good question from the chat I love this one it's from um WKD from YouTube says with the amount of launch experiments you do which bums you out more bad launch or not getting the shot oh you know I think at this point it's a bad launch that disappoints me more but that was only like a really recent flip because at this point there's just a ton of media that I can pull from to be like look how well things work um even if they don't like you know some of the time but uh yeah because because I have a videography background like I also really want to get the shot yeah yeah yeah so like sometimes I'll I'll do a launch and like my shutter speed on my camera will be too low and they're all blurry like they're all bad um or something like that but at this point I think the engineering is more what what disappoints me than the actual you know as long as I get the flight data back it's fine got it so what began to happen when you started having like success with your rockets actually coming back it felt really good it was like a solid year of failure um just like one after the other where each time it was more frustrating and then at some point the rocket went up and it didn't like fishtail everywhere and it didn't you know flop about it did actually fail to deploy the parachutes and slam into the ground but the up part worked um and yeah it just it's kind of how you it's kind of like how we watch SpaceX go from not being able to land anything to as soon as they could land it once and like get all of that data back on what a successful flight looked like it just got a lot faster it like it just really ramped up the pace and it's the same thing here is as soon as I knew what worked um it was able to I was able to really like focus on the things that were working and what what still that wasn't working um so everything just accelerated at that point yeah so verification was really like critical for moving this forward yeah for sure um and even you know it doesn't mean that at that point things were perfect like every single part of the rocket has fundamentally changed since that point um we went through a like a period of like not launching anything over the summer of 2017 where I was just revamping all of the math behind like the flight software and flight simulation um and things like that and that really improved reliability too but you know as soon as you get if you can get like that one success if you can make it to that point usually you can make it a little further yeah well speaking actually of moving forward this so many good questions in this chat um that someone asked specifically about that they're called apogesis uh that's pretty good oh it's such a such a good name yell that out so they ask how do you see your development pathway going forward better usability switch from solids to pressure fed liquids um advanced multi-stage yeah so many there's so many cool things that like in directions that this could go so i think um we've got like like three major things going on right now the first is this series of videos that i'm producing um it's sort of educational and it's like if you were going to start from nothing if you were going to start from where i was in 2015 like here's exactly how you'd go about landing a model rocket now i haven't done it yet so i'm you know like you don't have to follow the series and believe what i say but i feel like i'm pretty close and that leads to the second one that's so the first major one is producing that video series the second one is actually landing the rocket yeah we've come really close it's like two meters off the ground and it hovers and it it just it's so close um i'm in the middle of like um a massive software update for the landing stuff that's we're it's like it we're gonna stick it in 2019 for sure but i heard it here yeah yeah yeah you heard it here on tomorrow yeah yeah on february 2nd you heard it here i'll stand by it so um that and then the third one is the uh falcon heavy model i built a 140 scale model that was so impressive and heavy yes that was awesome it's like the staging look at it it's so look at how beautiful it is it's so true exactly what what elon said about it which is that on the surface it's like cool you strap three rockets together except it's like a billion times harder there's so many there's so many weird considerations that happen when you put three of these things together anyway those are like the three major projects that are like i'm working on now and at some point uh the landing is gonna sort of wrap up because we'll have done it i mean that's hopefully i suppose it couldn't happen but yeah um yeah there's some bigger projects that are coming up in like later 2019 um i don't know much i want to say about it okay but it's that's fair yeah the rockets are going to get larger oh that's so exciting um really good question from mini stoge uh actually hi stoge and uh she asks are you going to start building your models out of carbon fiber like electron yeah speaking of future stuff that's it's such a cool looking vehicle yes it is but uh yeah so actually we're at a small enough scale at least with these rockets most of them are about a meter tall right they're not they're not that large um and so it's actually you know as long as you're not hitting the ground that fast um it's better to just build them out of cardboard that's the latest material but like some of those larger projects actually i can talk about one of the larger projects okay we're i'm building a reaction control system um for a couple of high power rockets i'm working with um a buddy of mine up in boston with it um but yeah that's gonna need to be built out of a better material than cardboard because that's going to be going pretty high and really fast gotcha wow yeah yeah i mean if you're going high enough to need a reaction control system yes holy moly i kind of want to ask you about the challenge of using solid motors because i think you're just using only solid motors yeah at this time and that you know you light it and it's lit and it's burning until it runs out of fuel and there's no change in it yes yeah you have a mention of you can throttle back a little bit if you do certain things yeah okay so we'll first we'll address like the solid motor thing basically it's a little bit cheating honestly if you know your flight profile well enough like ahead if you know that you're gonna i don't know have an apogee between 50 and 60 meters or something just as an example you can get really close if you spec the motor that you use so it only landing even if even if you don't even if you don't get it quite right like the legs should be able to take a little bit of the impact if it drops and then if it pops a little bit hopefully you can just maintain stability long enough that it comes back down to the ground so it is cheating a little bit because i know exactly how high the rocket is going to go um and is that cheating or is that just really good science it's just it's just a lot of simple it's it's simplifying a lot of the problems that are with planes but i think that's kind of the key of engineering right yeah know what you need to do and get it right yeah whatever accomplishes the task if it works and it's stupid then it's not stupid yeah right um but okay so then the second part is you mentioned the throttling um the solid motors that can actually be done there are some there are some interesting ways that you can do that you could do one you could do like a system where you uh this is this is i kind of i refer to it as like cosine throttling because you get cosine losses on your motor so you have like two of them pointed outward and then you sort of gimbal them outward as you want less and less thrust that's one way to do it you could stick something in the exhaust plume that like you know takes away some of the thrust you could um there may actually be an instance of this later this year but you could perhaps change the size of your chamber um that sounds like the hardest possible thing to do but we'll see yeah yeah because i know a shuttle with the shuttle solid rocket boosters they would change basically change the surface area that would be burning inside of it right and that would allow the srvs to actually be able to be throttlable um if you wanted to with that yeah and the reason you know the one of the direct things if you know what like a hybrid motor is a hybrid motor is sort of a bridge between a liquid and a solid motor they're scary they're got all these problems but um they're like you could certainly do this with a small liquid motor or a hybrid motor um but you know there are also there's like a certain amount of challenges that i'm willing to accept in a certain amount where i'm like i'm just not going to touch that for a little while so hybrids and liquids like you're just not interested at the moment not right now okay yeah yeah so there's there's bigger projects coming but not right now which path are you leaning toward the gimbling out or you think it may be compressing the i still think it can just work with one the motors that i'm using um like in model rocket motors you generally expect like a five percent total impulse variance um so like how much how much total energy is your motor going to give the rocket um and there's there's usually about a five percent variation but i've done a bunch of testing um on the specific motors i'm using and it's like i found it to be within like one or two percent so i think that's enough that if i can get an accurate enough start on the record retro burn um i think i can reliably touch down again like we'll see who knows but and if it doesn't work i think the right way to do it um i outlined this in one of my videos but i think the the right way to do it might be to well the one that i would choose is you have a small set of tiny solid motors on the outside and then you sort of underspec the main landing motor so that you can sort of do it's almost like you know how the soyuz lands or the blue origin new shepherd capitalist pushed it down so you do like these little impulse motors on the side that just add or subtract well not subtract but like add a little bit of energy yeah we'll see i don't know okay i have got a question for you as actually as you're speaking i'm thinking a lot about okay what can be like this use for eventually because it's awesome you know it's really fun but and then you made these kits and i'm like what else could be used for well there's this awesome question from the chat that addresses this uh it's from al13n and they actually ask if you propulsively land can you actually put payload on it so is that a thing you thought of maybe doing is like doing some type of payload and eventually turning this into something you can yeah collaborate with other companies on yeah you could certainly do that um i think that's probably not the path that i'd take with it okay um i think if you like the height that most of my rockets end up going to it's just going to be more cost effective to send it up on a truck um you know some sometimes you get i mean not that there are ever ever people who leave mean comments on youtube but sometimes but sometimes the comments are like why you know why would you spend so much time on this like there's no real use for it and i actually i have to agree like it's not that there's no real use but like the plan isn't to go super commercial and have a bunch of you know big customers or whatever it's just like this is a cool project i like doing this stuff and i like teaching people along the way yeah um so i think you know maybe there are some commercial applications for it but mostly i'm i'm focused on the engineering and like how cool that is and the educational aspect too is huge i mean the fact that i was um watching one of the videos on your website and you know you're saying as soon as the kits hit the market and you weren't even going to do kits at first there's people recommending it yeah and as soon as it hit the market like sold out right away and that's just that's extraordinary because it's starting to then inspire the future generations to want to go into this and it it also is worth mentioning like you'll never beat like the simplicity in model rockets of fins the point yeah the point isn't that it's useful really it's that it's cool yeah yeah anyway which is which is a perfectly good reason to do it yeah i mean you know i've seen people turn things that shouldn't be rockets into rockets because it looks cool yeah so i mean who doesn't want to see a traffic cone suddenly flying i mean speaking of cool things like i do want to actually talk a little bit about your music and then also i i realized i was like that's something i definitely wanted to bring up and there is also a comment from the chat um also awesome chat room it comes from wkd and um they off of youtube and they ask what's the deal with wedding photographers and space so who knows man like what is that i mean i guess it's a thing i don't know maybe a lot of other people out there wedding photographers and love space travel but but where how did this this happen for you i mean yeah like i know three off the bat like brady kenneson is a wedding photographer really tim dodd was a wedding photographer yes what's the deal what's going on i believe he's um yeah i don't know what that is i like have no answer i will say that like i really didn't enjoy being a wedding videographer does anyone i mean i'm not gonna speak for everyone the same music i didn't enjoy it and like more than any other job i've ever had like i didn't enjoy that so much that you when you do a job that you don't like your mind goes immediately to what you want and so it was as soon as i started doing wedding videography and i saw the spacex stuff i was like cool like there's a there's like a countdown on me doing this job that's so epic do you do anything with music still um yeah so i studied at the berkeley college of music i have this really nice education in music and i kind of use it i mean mathematics well yeah i mean yeah to be fair there's like i did a lot of acoustics stuff at berkeley too and there's like a lot of cool um math and determining the mode of a room or things like that but um i do music um kind of like tim dodd i make all the music for the videos that i put out it's not a ton of stuff but um yeah it's fun music is great yeah i kind of want to ask you too as someone like myself who started like in an art background and is now going into engineering and things like that um what was kind of the have you gotten a reaction from the aerospace community on this and kind of like how's that been because i know that when i went into the aerospace community um it was kind of like feeling like an outsider coming in initially like i was someone with a different perspective than everybody else coming in and kind of like i don't want to say being shunned but not necessarily it doesn't feel good yeah it doesn't really feel that great to be around initially so dismissal so yeah a little bit of dismissal as uh i think that's normal yeah i mean i i felt that for a while um they're still like there are still situations we did i did a um i presented some of my work at the marshall space flight center in uh huntsville alabama and i remember so i mean they're all brilliant like in ways that like i just will never understand they're all just brilliant down there and so i presented my work and like naturally as engineers they want to know the details yeah and there's a there's a real limit to like my knowledge on this stuff because a lot of it is learned by experimentation which means i have these weird holes in like my like what i know so they would ask a question that to them seems really simple and i'd be like honestly i don't know right um so there's still there's still stuff like that um i think i don't know i think everyone feels like an outsider at some point do you have any plans to maybe get you know part-time work on an engineering degree maybe having the math and the the actual materials knowledge that they're asking about would that give you kind of a an edge on you yeah a little boost for what you're doing i mean that would certainly be like the responsible thing to do and i think it i think it honestly is a good a good thing to do i don't have any like hard plans for it right now but i think especially if if the ambition is to work in an actual airspace job which right now it's just a further bps but if that's if my goal switches back to like i want to work for an aerospace engineering company i think the responsible thing to do is like to go back and get your degree um there's a there's like i think i um there's a little mini doc that motherboard did um just recently but i mentioned it in this and i'll mention it again there are some things that work for self-teaching like for software engineering where you can mess things up a bunch of times and just re-upload your code that's fine i think um but like if you're a surgeon maybe you don't want to do the self-taught and i think aerospace is somewhere in between there especially if you're working at the larger scale the stakes are really high um and you you kind of want to really have that good base of knowledge yeah so for the model rocket scale it's fine but at some point you know you probably want to get the degree and when you do these test flights you kind of have like an audience with you there watching them like if you do you do them at like little events that they have on the weekends or i'm not so i'm not superstitious except for this one thing because as it goes yeah so every single time every single time every single time i have brought people to a launch and been like hey you want to come see my like what i do for my job um it goes terribly wrong um it's like one time um one time i brought my parents and my grandfather and like my friends out to this test site and it was sunset and it was gorgeous and the rocket goes up super straight and then it comes down and it's time to deploy the parachutes and it deploys them and the parachutes work except that they're not connected to the rocket oops indeed and a completely smashed rocket uh one time uh actually just recently so my friend nanny is for this little kid he's like six or seven years old and he loves space you know because it's a little kid yeah um and so i was like hey come see a rocket launch um and that whole week i tried every single day to launch the rocket and every time something would fail with the motor ignition or something i made a whole video about it i was watching that yeah failure and burnout and it's just like i don't know what it is i wish it wouldn't be the case but honestly like half the reason i generally just have myself and no one else at the launch site is because it's not a safety thing it's just like things seem to just go wrong when other people are there performance anxiety yeah that's what it is so uh no possibility for a live stream is a question we have from the chat from pcs locked what if joe live streams next bps space launch and tim covers it just isn't really a different thing i would be down to have someone else live stream it okay because i it's the live stream is mostly just i'm focused all on getting the rocket set up and then getting my camera set up i don't know maybe like all of these other little tiny things that have to happen at the launch site and a lot of my energy can't be focused on like what's the chat what's the chat doing right right yeah so if someone else you know came down and live stream that would be cool i'm probably not going to do it just myself yes you're willing to show it live and not talk about it like three days later like blue origin or something there's a lot of secretive stuff that they do and then it won't be superstitious anymore so yeah there we go you'll break the superstition in my in my mind yeah oh and we actually have a question from tim dodd the everyday astronaut so he asks um how you land with how do you land with the solids one motor two motors how does the computer calculate when you ignite the next engine cool yeah so hi tim what's up but uh yeah the way that i do it it's it's sort of like brute force through a lot of simulation actually you hear elan must talk about this sometime called a monte carlo simulation stuff so for calculating when you want to land the rocket motor i have a flight simulator offline that i just i run a ton of simulations and find like cool with this given profile with the vehicle mass with um these two it's two motors you have one motor for ascent and then it burns out and they're actually i think i i just i talk about it a little bit in the falcon heavy video but they're actually stacked on top of each other and the second motor literally hot stages the nice it's like an old school atlas yeah yeah but it's a um yeah so it's sort of brute force through a lot of simulation um you determine what where is like the range of altitudes that i should be burning that retro motor um and then it's pretty simple in the flight software um it's nothing like the real falcon 9 uses um this super complex thing called g fold but um my rockets mostly just look at the apogee they look at a couple other things like the orientation if it's going to be safe to burn the motor things like that and then they just sort of call it when they see it um nice nice very cool so overall what has sort of like been the biggest takeaway from all of this for you like what's the thing that's affected you the most that you would kind of want to throw out there for for everyone to take i think this might seem obvious at this point so bps has a decent size following at this point but um share your work online like yeah even if it's even if it's not good especially like you can see if you go all the way back to like the beginning videos on the bps youtube channel or like i don't know it's really hard to go all the way back on twitter but whatever um yes all the way back like even if even if stuff isn't working you should still share what you're working on online um you don't have to share all of it you don't have to like open source it but if you share it you'll become a better engineer because of it um i definitely have like every time something has failed sometimes it's frustrating when someone's like well why don't you just do this but a lot of the times people just want to help and they just want and you know they have different perspectives that will help you so i guess the takeaway for me is like make sure like if you're doing something cool tell other people about it um don't there's a lot of excuses you can make to not share your work online and i think most of them aren't aren't really tell us a little bit about bps space um what would you like to know it's mostly i don't really understand it still so is it like a resource for people to go to i mean they could buy they could buy kits as well from you this is hard it's hard to describe because i still don't really know like what to focus on um or rather like what to focus on when i'm talking about it but it's a um so right now we're in the middle of designing a new computer with all of the you know specific things that we want to land the model rocket and then after that like i'm just going to bring everyone along as we design all the mechanical parts and things like that um but yeah so it's a little bit of a resource we're also a direct to consumer like we sell um these flight computers for thrust vector control and model rockets um they are out of stock right now i'm working really hard to fix manufacturing stuff but um but yeah we sell those um and then a lot of the you know some of the bigger things are uh we release a lot of the files um that come out with the landing model rocket series on patreon so we're we're um a lot of the reason that this stuff still exists is through patreon which is crazy it's amazing like the generosity of some people yeah yeah and if people would like to get more information about you joe where can they go to literally bps.space you don't need the www either got rid of that yeah bps.space that's the website all right well joe thank you so much for coming on the show today yeah thanks for having you're doing some amazing work in an area that has really like not seen much advancement for a very long period of time model rocketry has been pretty static in terms of uh what it can do recently with like arduino and everything it's kind of come to a point where you can like do some really cool things but you're like x but you're making it exponentially cooler yeah with being able to land it and i'm really looking forward to the big things um because i would like to land my big things yeah um with that mostly because i always have problems packing my parachutes so uh so joe thank you so much for coming on the show today and of course we want to thank you our viewers and our patrons as well our escape velocity citizens these folks give us ten dollars or more per episode to help us out here at tomorrow also our orbital citizens who give us five dollars or more per episode as well and then of course we have our suborbital citizens you give us 250 or more per episode and we'll give you a little bit of time to find your name here and of course we also have our ground support citizens as well you can uh attempt to find your name there as best you can uh very itty bitty font and i love the fact that that font has has to get smaller and smaller and smaller as things are going on um and you when you support us here at tomorrow you're able to uh provide things like these amazing interviews like we got to do with joe today um to talk about bps space um also our new show which is brand new um which everyone seems to like and we're going to definitely keep uh doing that as well and maybe some things in the future yes as well with that and of course we do give you rewards back you know you can check us out on discord at our discord channel and you can also come on over to community.tmro.tv as well because it's not just financial support that we welcome if you have any sort of skills that you would like to help us out with uh you are more than welcome to bring them to the show um and we will utilize them and we'll put you to work uh if you want to get put to work uh so on next week's show 12.06 we are going to have asgardia uh come on in to talk about the uh the attempt or i guess they sort of are uh a space nation yeah i know a couple citizens currently yeah i know i know i think me and space mike actually signed up uh to be a part of that so um oh and ben too so i don't think we've paid our citizenship fees oh you've paid yours okay i haven't paid mine so i guess it's a mayor or something i will have to are you like the overlord of asgardia or he said you're the lackey okay all right so uh yeah all right so thank you so much for watching tomorrow orbit 12.05 and we will see you next time