Scout - Flight 1 Raw Footage and Data Review (Patreon)

Hey Patrons!

Great to see lots of you on the live stream for Scout's launch the other day! Thank you again for all the patience in getting that flight off the ground. Given how much worked right off the bat with this flight here, I'd say it was worth the wait :)

This is all the raw footage from the flight, plus about 40 minutes of looking through the data that was recorded onboard. There's a lot to look through, so I'll summarize quickly here, and you can watch the whole review if you'd like more details!

As far as the data goes, it looks like the Kalman filter on AVA's NAV computer is what gave us that slide near the end. I break it down in the video, but the filter is off by a solid 1m/s on the Y axis velocity estimate at the end of landing. The controller worked great, actually, but the measurements/estimates on how fast we were sliding were off. 

I'm also not going to write off a set of pointy ends on the landing feet. Nothing that would truly jam it in the ground, but something so we stop bouncing up. Perhaps a little aluminum crunch zone! The stakes are too high to try landing on concrete, and though the bounce is better now, it still exists. Might end up building a test rig to find a nice solution before the next flight.

I anticipate that we'll fly again in December, I just need a bit of time to nail down the bugs I found on this flight :)

Blue skies,

Joe