Burn Hard (Patreon)

Just a weekly update here! Writing this from Boston, MA, where I'm spending a few days with my family. 

The next episode of Landing Model Rockets comes out for Mach 1 tier patrons late Tuesday! It was slightly delayed because of the trip home this weekend, but it's a good one for sure! I spend the time addressing the complexity of liquid rocket engines with Charlie Garcia. We also dive into the challenges of hybrid rocket engines with Jonny Hyman - both him and Jonny are brilliant engineers and have supported BPS.space for a long time. Finally near the end of the video I outline the options for "throttle" control with solid rocket motors - something that may be required for reliably landing model rockets propulsively. 

Arc and Impulse began testing recently as well! Impulse, the launch computer, is in excellent working order, and will support all future launches. New launch software with more advanced continuity detection and launch commit logic was uploaded, so all that's left is mounting it to the pad.

As mentioned in the last update, Arc will need several updates before it's ready to control a flight as the main computer. Right now the most pressing issue is with the flash memory chip onboard. It seems that one of the subroutines that auto-calibrates the gyroscopes(then puts that data in the flash chip) is acting up. This type of problem should be a simple software fix - at which point we can get the iOS/Android side of things working and get Arc on the launch pad!

Orders were just placed for the propellant for the all-up Falcon Heavy launch too! Definitely going to be a nail biter - we know the boosters work, I know how to fix the center core, but the second stage is still a big question mark. I'm somewhat convinced that tiny vehicle can be controlled solely with better tuning. We shall see...

Things have been super busy in the BPS rocket factory(my living room); the best way to describe it is that we're burning hard. Thanks to all of you again for your support, and stay tuned for your early access to Landing Model Rockets Ep. 2 in a few days. As always if you have questions, please feel free to reach out!

Blue skies,

Joe

P.S. that photo is from like 1.5 years ago during a static test. No real relation here, but check out all that fire!!!