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The DIY Rocketeer Building SpaceX Replicas of Self-Landing Rockets - YouTube
Channel: Motherboard
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I would love to put something
on the surface of the moon.
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But, it's tremendously expensive
to put things in space.
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The whole space launch industry,
people building rockets
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and putting things in space
is going through this massive revolution.
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Everyone is basically working towards this
goal of democratizing space.
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I certainly see
the new space wave coming
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and I'm going to try my best
to just ride it.
[40]
As a kid, my dad and I
would go out to a field
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with a couple of a little model rockets
and shoot them off but,
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I didn't get really serious
about it until three years ago.
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My name is Joe Barnard,
I'm an amateur rocketeer.
[53]
I'm not sure if amateur is the
right word to use for that
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because at this point
they're pretty advanced.
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I saw this video of SpaceX testing
one of their rocket landings.
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These are things that are the size
of 17-story buildings
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that are just nimbly going up into the air,
hovering and coming back down gently.
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I saw the video of this and realized
that's what I want to be doing.
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And I was like, oh, I could probably
figure out how to code.
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I had like, just bought a
3D printer for fun,
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I could probably design
some rocket parts.
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I figured, maybe that would be a
good way to show up at SpaceX's doorstep
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and say, hey, look at this thing.
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Like, I'm willing to teach myself
these concepts.
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Can I have a job?
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The goal has since changed.
Like, I've had opportunities to do that
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at this point,
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I'm just way more excited right now
about turning this into
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something bigger than it is.
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Excellent.
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All right, welcome to the
rocket factory.
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It's more of an apartment than a
rocket factory, honestly.
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Most of this apartment where you'd
usually put like a TV
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or where you'd put like a couch
or something, is just rockets.
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I founded a company
called BPS.Space.
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The company develops
amateur rocketry components
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that are focused on matching the pace
of advancement in the real space industry.
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We're just kind of
starting out right now.
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You can learn a tremendous amount
by just working a lot with software
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and working at the
small scale of rockets.
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One of the things that I can't
emphasize enough
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is how little I knew
about rockets when I got started.
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I had recently graduated with a
degree in audio production
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from the Berklee College of Music.
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I was working as a wedding
videographer and
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I was just willing to fail a whole lot
and learn from mistakes
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you know, everyday basically.
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So this is the graveyard.
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All of these are flight computers.
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This is just how like,
iterative design works.
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So, all of these computers are
basically leading up to this,
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which is the most recent series of
flight computers and launch computers
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and things like that.
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This is what goes inside
almost all of my rockets.
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It's got a little orientation sensor,
it has an altitude sensor,
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it has a little Bluetooth chip
so you can talk to it with your phone.
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So this is the App I built
and there's the computer
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that just popped up.
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It's really like mission control
for your phone.
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When you start learning something
you make these little, tiny improvements
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that seem like miracles.
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Obviously there are industries
that you don't want to have
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self-taught people in.
Like, you don't want to have
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a surgeon who just experiments
on people until he gets it right.
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Like, that's not good.
But for things like software,
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where you can just reload new code.
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For things like hardware,
where you can 3D print something
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and it doesn't work
so you just print again.
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Right now, it's tremendously
cost-prohibitive to put things into space.
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But there are so many new space launch
companies that are just trying to
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get into this market.
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Everyone is basically working
towards this goal of democratizing space.
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You have larger companies,
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these guys have really ambitious projects.
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But, at the smaller scale
there are lots of companies targeting
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how low can we get that cost
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and how quickly can we get
your thing in space?
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I haven't been able to land
a model rocket yet, right.
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But, I'm getting really close.
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Just in the last few months
I've started actually
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conducting these landing tests.
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We're going to drop the rocket
from a drone
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and we're going to simulate the second-
half of flight without needing to also launch it.
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One of the hardest things
about doing these launches
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is running like ten different cameras
and also launching a rocket,
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and also making sure
you're on top of safety.
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This is a totally solo thing.
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All right, that's rolling.
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So much of how I learn this stuff
and how I improve
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it just through
having all of these cameras.
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I could do it without it,
but it just solves a lot of problems.
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Cool.
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What we can see right off the bat
is that the rocket came down
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and burned the motor
a little bit too late.
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As it comes down it's really at an angle here
even though it starts to really correct here,
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it's too late, it's still moving
pretty fast at that point.
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And, I'll have to update that
in the flight software,
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I'll have to look at the flight data
and see if something went wrong.
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But this is a good test overall.
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A pretty constant theme of this
whole project has been like,
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just the willingness
to continue pushing forward.
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There are a lot of people
who want to go really high and fast,
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they want to build big rockets.
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The problem with that is
if you pour so much engineering time
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and effort into one of these things
and you make one mistake,
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like all of that is gone.
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And, the same thing applies at
the small scale, except that the small scale,
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you can test again the next week
'cause they're cardboard rockets.
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I'll reset some of these things,
like this wire was too long
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so it didn't heat up enough to actually
cut open the landing legs.
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I'll reload a motor, with a lot of these things
you're just looking for like what is the most
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dead, simple solution I can have.
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If you were SpaceX
or a real aerospace company,
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you'd spend you know, $500,000.00
fixing this problem with science.
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I do it with blue tape.
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If I'm running into some error
like I can't figure out why,
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this chip isn't working
or something is broken on here,
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or it won't communicate,
I can just go to the internet
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and look up anything on these forums
and someone has had that problem before.
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Almost certainly.
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You know like, I did teach myself,
but it's, a lot of this stuff is just because of
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everyone else sharing
what they're learning online.
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What we want to do is find out
how sensitive the thrust vector
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control system should be, so that we can
effectively keep the rocket upright.
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Fundamentally, how most of my
rockets fly is different
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than most model rockets.
Traditional model rockets fly like darts.
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They have little fins on them
that keep them stable through the air.
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But, if you watch the launch of
like a Falcon 9 or an Atlas V,
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any of these massive rockets
they don't have fins.
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And what they use is something called
thrust vector control.
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The motors that are at the bottom
that are pushing out all this fire
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and this flame,
they're moving back and forth
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in just small deviation so that
they can steer the rocket up into space.
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That's how my rockets work too.
The thrust vectoring mount,
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which holds the motor in
points it in different directions
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and that鈥檚 right here.
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Man, okay, don't put this in
if it doesn't go well but,
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I have a pretty high confidence that
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what I've changed for this test
will really improve the landing results.
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You know, I still don't think we're
gonna touch down very softly on this one.
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Like, standing upright, but I think
we should have some better results here.
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When you tell people that you're
flying with hobby rocket motors,
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they're kind of like, oh, you know,
why is this 25-year-old playing with toys?
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And it's so much different than that.
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We're not going to space or anything,
but these are huge advancements.
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I think in the next five years
we're going to see a whole lot more
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excitement about space
just because of that.
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I think we're about to go through a
newer and much bigger revolution
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in space projects, things like that
than we did in the 60s
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when we sent people to the moon.
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The nerves are going,
I'm super nervous.
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It doesn't matter that I've
rehearsed this stuff a bunch times
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it doesn't matter that I鈥檝e like,
brought all these things out to a field
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40 plus times at this point,
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it doesn't matter that it's all
really rehearsed.
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I'm just nervous 'cause every time
there's a chance that something that I've added,
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or something that I've
taken away from the rocket
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is like that one component that like
is necessary for the whole thing to go well.
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It landed on the legs!
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That was cool, man.
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I feel great.
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That's going to be
some really solid data.
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A couple of other people have done
thrust vectoring before but,
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certainly no one has come as far
as the BPS program has.
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I intend to take it further.
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But I think making a lot of these
advancements at the small scale
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where I can afford to fail hard
and fail often,
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those are just like,
really important things.
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When people ask questions,
like why do we spend so much money
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on space travel?
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I just think there's literally unlimited
potential for the growth of humanity.
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I would love to send something
to the moon, but, there are a lot of steps
[544]
in between where I am now
and what is required to send something
[550]
that far, that accurately.
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