Can This Model Rocket Land More Than Once? 

Sir I believe you may have passed beyond "amateur" rocketry, and I am an engineer. Your SRB based soft-landing has significant impacts in drone and rocket based cargo delivery.

What launches first. BPS Starship stack or the actual starship stack?

Dude your commitment is insane. I gotta give it you man. You're amazing

THE STARSHIP MODEL IN THE BACK LOOKS AMAZING! CANT WAIT :D

That transition for the OnShape sponsorship message was sooooo smooth. These little things are icing on the delicious cakes that are your videos. As a master’s student specializing in control systems, the way your approached the flight control is so inspirational. It’s one of the prime real life examples I have seen where you iteratively tweaked the parameters to make it more and more robust. Thank you for being a great teacher. So excited for the upcoming projects!

For the Big Scout, you can actually remove the springs from the RC car shock absorbers. If they are the oil type (not the friction type), you will get a nice long travel linear damper out of them. They're also easy to take apart and sometimes have a set of discs that can vary the dampening effect.

Imagine what this world would be like if everyone had this kind of work ethic, drive and dedication...

Many years ago when I was racing indoor RC cars, we also felt the need for dampers. For us, we used a solid rod (nylon) that fit inside another nylon tube. Then we put various thicknesses of silicon grease on the rod/tube to create a lightweight simple damper. After each race, you had to disassemble, clean, and regrease. You should easily get 3~6" of landing gear movement. Also, point the landing pads with the outside edges pointing up. You want to land on your heels, not your toes. Your rocket is stumbling on touchdown. Practice in the house dropping the rocket from .5m with a slight swing to practice landing. Use your camera at high speed to review exactly what is happening. Check the flight data recorder to review and adjust the damper length and thickness. Currently, your dampers have such little throw, they almost do nothing.

Congratulations on the first landing! Can't wait for more flights! As always keep up the outstanding work👏👏

When you do a larger version of this, I hope you will consider putting in a cold gas thruster system to correct attitude on landing :) would allow you to fix those tilt and asymmetrical leg loading problems! You could use a butane gas canister if your rocket airframe is relatively heat resistant (I foresee the exhaust igniting it lol) as they are not so heavy for the gas volume unlike CO2. Using a heater circuit will allow for flashing liquid butane into gaseous to give you a good thrust level!

I met Joe a few weeks ago and he was great to talk to. The upcoming projects sound so interesting and I can't wait for new updates to come out.

Huge congratulations for the Scout programs! The flights look so smooth now. Can’t wait for the next flights!

The RC shock absorber will work for you! You just need to put oil in them. They always comes dry. But once you put oil in it they stop being "springy"

You might benefit from the VL53L1X - which is a very tiny laser rangefinder chip. I am in the Bay Area and I could help produce a PCB for you with wiring (for free :) that would allow you to hook it up into a small JST connector or something, it just uses an i2c bus. This way you can give your flight computer very highly accurate altitude data when it is about to land

Wait..wait..WAIT A SUPER HEAVY-STARSHIP THAT DOES WHAT?!

Great to see you moving to a different project right after you've successfully achieved a proper landing! I'm sure the Starship project will have you busy for a long time. Definitely not 7 years though lol. You've come a long way - this project should be much easier with all the knowledge you have now. In the long run though, are you going to make a liquid rocket engine? I'm not talking about a 'real' one with a turbopump and everything, but you could make a pressure-fed engine pretty easily nowadays, considering the fact that metal 3D printing is widely available and so are carbon-composite high pressure tanks. Obviously you can't achieve this now (or maybe you can, who knows!), but in 2-4-6 years you could have enough income to actually make a liquid fueled model rocket. Maybe even SpaceX would finally recognize you after all these years of trying to get a job there.

Amazing how far you have come! Great Job!

Bravo to all of your efforts. As someone who designed, built and launched a simple two stage home-made (i.e. not a kit) rocket with a mouse payload, with heart rate radio telemetry, in my High School Physics class in 1972, I’m amazed at what you’re doing.

At 4:52 I literally mouthed the words KA-BOOM and to my amazement we indeed had a big ka-boom on screen lol

Hmmm... Background Starship looks promising!

I wish I had found your channel sooner but going backing and watching this journey was crazy inspirational. Looking forward to future content!

Blows my mind that you put that much work into the rocket and are still able to create quality videos. They feel very…calm and exciting both at the same time. I love the style!

I am a newcomer to your channel and feel compelled to sing your praises. Your videos are well put together, interesting and fun. I also appreciate how you break things down for the layman. Good luck on the large rocket build!

Nice work as always Joe!!! Congrats again! For how saw all your work since the beginning and your problem solving skills this video was comforting. It gives as an idea of the great accomplishments this is. And we know for the background that you already started another amazing proyect! Keep the great work! PD. Now you deserve a grate vacation trip man! You rock! If you want we are glad to receive you here in Argentina for a grate vacation trip. 🇦🇷 🚀

Thank you. Your Scout is a thing of beauty.

It's nice one and your consistent approach made your project sucessfull. Thanks for sharing.

Just awesome!!! Been watching from the beginning. It is amazing watching your progress. Keep it up Joe!!!!

That starship is gonna be SICK

great work and showing how design development works

Amazing work thanks for the inspiration

Pretty incredible work there.

Great stuff Joe!

lookin forward to your future projects!

Nice stuff Joey B

finally,been missing my dude aloot lately....I appreciate your work big man👊

Just love what you're doing mate ☺️

Love your work and thanks a lot for the content. Just an FYI. An RC car coil over doesn't just spring back. It actually has adjustable rebound by changing the disc's/Pistons. It has holes to control it. Since you have 4 of them you could use very small ones. I would definitely research them before discounting them. If you have any questions I race them and have a business where I invented parts for them to make them tougher. Thanks again.

I've loved every bit (almost, the time before Gunch... You know the one) of your journey and look forward to seeing everything you do in the future. You're awesome Joe!

This is absolutly amazing.

Joh, you are realy clever man. Good luck for your work!

Came across your channel randomly this month and started from the beginning. finally made it to the latest!

I've been watching your videos since scout D, keep it up!

Oh yes let’s go I see starship!

Well done Joe. Looks like you had a blast.

I only recently found your channel and must say I love seeing rocket science on a small scale.

Great info, looking forward to seeing the larger rockets.

Idea here!! I think the flex in the legs is fine because it absorbs the impact but it’s the rebound that bounces the rocket to the other side. So you could try letting the legs flex with a rebound damper to keep the legs from springing the rocket to the opposite side. So somehow design a linkage that flexes as the strut compresses then the strut will slow how quickly that flex returns. Just applying some bike knowledge here.

Your work gives me crazy inspiration and more reasons why I should go into this science field

Think of all of the things that worked perfectly every time on that rocket. The staging, the TVC, throttle control. All reliably working. So epic!

RIP to my ears at 4:52.......... you my friends are a damn genius

I’m excited to see this idea scaled up.

Your combination of enthusiasm, optimism and pragmatism is inspiring and infectious, never stop what you're doing!

Love ur vids man. You got me into model rocketry :)

Amazing progress! Quick solution for the legs dampening - connect 2 dampeners in series.

Hella keen on the starship rocket!

Thanks for the great summary. Scout has done its job.

Anything you can learn from is a successful flight. Even if it explodes. Learning from the failed flight imo is the best data you can get!. Keep up the amazing work!

I like this constant improvement and great explanations. Somehow this whole rocket start and landing shows a huge amount of grace how smoothly things develope or tranistion. And each time it catches me again even though I had never been that rocket guy except for the early V2 Wernher von Braun developed and firework rockets. Great video and also a really nice sponsor that fits to the content seriously, not another cheap trick squarspace or eco flow bluetti poweroak crap

Such a cool project. Loving the larger scale starship tease.

Good progress!

I love what this guy does so much that i watch the ads for full revenue, Keep up the hard work!

I don't know shit about what you're doing but you present it all so enthusiastic and professional that i love watching you talking abracadabra ... keep it up because i can't wait ... Greetings from The Netherlands 👍😁

Good stuff! I think you are correct that with a larger version, some of these issues will work themselves out. I am curious whether you looked at using a 3-legged version.

Amazing work!! A few ideas that might come handy on future revisions/ on the BFR :) Shock absorbers close to the body instead of on the tip of the arms, should help with bouncing and removes inertia from the legs for better deployment! Thrusting vectoring can help with throttle management with two or more motors so on the bigger rocket consider using more than one motor 😄

Cool stuff sir! Keep at it!

My goodness that camera/lens and lighting you use for your studio shots is amazing

Really well done good job. :)

"Where are my legs?!" is a very funny clip.

Got my BT-80 body tube last night, I have some 3d prints, but I might go with a laser cut balsa wood mount. Can't wait!

Brilliant project !!! To me, it's a raving success. As you say, this is a solvable problem with the legs and your time will be better spent when you build a scaled up version of this vehicle. The larger mass will likely help towards solving the issue.

Another great video. Keep up the good work :)

Lol love the explosion. Love the idea of landing a rocket. It's not natural but can be done. Keep up the great work.

Yo, my man, you are amazing! Love your work!

Dude you are one man spacex👏👏👏👏

HELLO JOE BARNARD THANKS FOR THE VIDS

Awesome rockets

They come in haaaaard 😂😂 beautiful! Looks like the legs flipping out affects the stability too.

Been waiting for this for so long :D

The ascent and descent engine gimbaling is amazing!

For the legs: To avoid the issue of one leg hitting the ground before the other legs you might try one of two solutions: Some sort of linkage attaching to the leg on the opposite side to counteract similar to the philosophy of anti-roll-bars on car suspensions Another solution following the KISS method would be to have one single damper that all four landing legs act on instead of a separate damper for each leg. This way a single leg hitting first has a relatively stiffer damping force counteracting than all four legs at once.

Keep it going champ 🔥🔥

It just clicked what your Scout rockets reminded me of. The landers used in Robert L. Forwards sci-fi series "Roche World". His are a little stouter and only use a tripod landing gear configuration, because one of those landing legs is used to lower an airplane to the ground out of the side of the descent stage.

I love the starship taking shape in the background

LOVE the poster on the wall :-)

I think if you look into the idea behind sway bar links and how they work on automotive suspension and apply this idea somehow to the legs so the legs are always more level to the ground than the body of the vehicle. This was my first immediate idea for a possible solution. Maybe a type of four way sway bar if that’s possible? I love your videos and how ambitious your projects are. Keep up the great work!

Thank you for letting us participate in your journey to landing a model scale rocket - I'll definitely call it a success! Looking very much forward to the model starship story. Will the full stack take off before the real one? The race is on!

I truly appreciate you.

Thank you from China🇨🇳 I love you vdo 👍👍👍

Great poster in the background! I took the photo of Nexø II. 👍🏻

I would have loved to do something like this, but way easier to watch someone else do a great job of it instead. Keep it up, I love it!! 😄

You sir are a magician

You're really good at naming things

Good stuff

well done on your massive effort hs paid off. lookng forward to the new rocket

Have you thought about using hybrid engines to be able control thrust more precisely. Might help with reusability too.

2:05 You ain't got no legs, Lieutenant Dan!

The similarity of the audio between flight 6 and the Xombie in-air relight is amazing. There is a distinct noise of doppler shifting a rocket that is slowly moving away from the camera, and then coming back.

Incredible

There's tunable oil piston dampeners too. Some you have to open and change a disc for the right resistance, others just twist. There's a trade off with tunability of a higher failure potential. The only thing I can think of to synch the legs is a cable drive linking them. Lot of torsion though.

i would have loved to do something like this, but way easier to watch someone else do a great job of it instead ,Keep it up, I love it!!