Thrust Vectoring at Model Scale | Hacker News Reader

Thrust Vectoring at Model Scale

bps.space

189 pointstosh33 comments

If you’re into any of the stuff at all, I’d highly recommend Joe‘s YouTube channel. He’s just a consummate professional, very high standards of quality, and very deliberate and methodical about development of this technology.

He’s since started working on the next generation flight controller/avionics platform: AVA. He’s wrapping up the first iteration of a dual motor retro-rocket landing capability and it’s possible we’ll see the first propulsively landed solid-fuel (!!!) rocket flight yet this year.

This is almost an understatement. Absolutely incredible channel, really pushing the limits.

You know the toys you're shopping for are the coolest when the webpage says their sale is restricted to US citizens and residents only. Is that an ITAR thing?

Yeah, ITAR restricts export of guided rocketry systems, which this qualifies as. He’s mentioned ITAR in some of his videos as one of the reasons he doesn’t distribute his firmware or schematics.

The Trump Administration seems to have significantly loosened ITAR for almost everyone (IIRC primarily intended to make it less onerous for small arms researchers and manufacturers), including individuals, and specifically addresses removing some forms of software and designs from the USML. If it's firmware or designs as far as I'm aware there may be no problem with that now, even if it's rocketry or guidance software.

Among my many random roles in my job, I do export technical licensing review. I can assure you the industry practices on ITAR have only tightened in recent years, and the only language clarifications that have affected my review policies are over 4 years old.

Small arms researchers and manufacturers who are inside the US should not be affected by ITAR nearly at all. The only restriction ITAR / EAR places on a US company is to not sell or share technical assistance (any kind of design, etc) with any foreign persons (which includes public disclosure).

What he may have done is change the classification of certain small arms technologies. But that does not affect the "ITAR" process or its "looseness".

Joe Barnard (the guy behind BPS.space) has some great videos behind the controls involved in this project on the BPS.space channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCILl8ozWuxnFYXIe2svjHhg

He also has a ton of other really great talks on controls engineering on his main channel.

Seeing these attempts at model-scale, I'm minded of Elon Musk's assertion that 'things get easier to control the larger you go'. If that's the case - and intuitively it certainly seems so - the future looks fairly bright where orbital insertion, and returns, are concerned.

- ed

Here's a 13 year old girl's guided model rocket.[1] It's a moving fin system, so there's not much control until it picks up some speed after launch. Then it stabilizes and goes straight up.

[1] https://youtu.be/kTND_wot9zI

All of the comments under video say it's not guided but rather stabilized.

Yeah, pesky .gov has a problem with "guided" projectiles. Stabilized systems rather than guided systems keep you out of legal trouble.

That seems to be an urban legend. There are regulations on size and power of model rockets, but not on guidance, at least in the US.[1]

[1] https://www.nar.org/find-a-local-club/section-guidebook/laws...

The regulations are not rocketry/FAA/explosives regulations that the NAR deals with, but rather munitions export regulations. Specifically, guidance systems are munitions and therefore are regulated under ITAR Category IV, which means a US resident cannot export the technology by, for example, putting it in a public GitHub repo.

https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CFR-2016-title22-vol1/xm...

Is this missile guidance system a weapon in the eyes of the law?

The feds haven't busted down my friends door for contributing yet.

https://github.com/MuMech/MechJeb2

> Is this missile guidance system a weapon in the eyes of the law?

Yes, it is.

> The feds haven't busted down my friends door for contributing yet.

That's a video game. There are no restrictions on building guided-missile-shaped pixels. If it were shown that the technology could be deployed in a real missile, it'd be ITAR real quick, and the person (like yourself) who were the one to show that it could be deployed in a real missile could be guilty of providing technical assistance to a foreign agent via a github release and public comment.

Not that I think that's the case, but it's really best to tread lightly around these things. You don't want to find out that a bunch of small-time terrorists bought a hobby rocket, and uploaded a kerbal mod, and downed a jet full of tourists or ignited an oil field.

I love these kinds of projects. Think about how much of the technology in use here was out of reach for the average person even a decade ago - the sensors, microprocessors, 3D printer & rapid prototyping. The amount of magic we can leverage for hobby projects these days is genuinely inspiring to me.

Really enjoyed the video showing the spectacular failures in the build up to getting it right.

Turns out rocket science is hard.

Aren't you not allowed to add guidance to model rockets because it starts to be considered a guided munition, i.e. missile?

If you don't put guidance on it, it's a ballistic missile.

Though for any reasonable model rocket a very short-range ballistic missile.

It's not illegal to do technical development on potentially restricted munitions-class stuff (see ITAR) ... but you better document everything and keep that documentation to yourself. At the same time, there are lots and lots of other laws regarding what things you can own that you had better be careful of.

I like the thrust vectoring part, but what I really need is that in the upper tube to do parachute steering with an automated "return to launch GPS coordinate" setting. I lose so many rockets because of that.

I wish he’d just stick to carbonating milk

Rules the skies!

I've been following Joe Bernard's YouTube videos for a few years, he's really great. Goes into a lot of detail about how he designs, builds, and flies thrust-vectoring model rockets.

$350 for the controller PCB is a bit high. Is the software even open source or not?

The $349 price shown at https://bps.space/shop/signal-r2 is for more than just the controller PCB. See the "IN THE BOX" section of https://bps.space/signal/

Seems to be a commercial product, given the small market the price seems reasonable since development cost doesn't go down but the number of units it gets spread across does.

Is it a commercial product? I’m under the impression that what this enables (slow thrust vectored ascent of small rockets) is extremely cool from a hobby perspective as it’s more “accurate” to how large rockets work - but from a raw functionality perspective for small rockets you’re probably better off just using faster motors and fins to stabilize.

Commercial meaning it's being sold for profit and manufactured to be sold for profit. The market is die hard hobbyist but the product is a commercial venture selling to those hobbyists.

edit: Versus an open source project or someone's hobby project just being sold at cost.

That’s probably $.10 per hour for his time in it if the hardware was free.

I can't seem to find a cite for this (may have been in a video) but I remember Joe being asked about open source, and he responded that he'd like to but rocket stability and especially guidance software is an absolute legal minefield in the US.

Yes, he mentions frequently that he's concerned about ITAR. Under a strict reading of the Munitions list and ITAR regulations, rocket guidance software is a Category IV Munition and can't be exported. Unfortunately (as we learned from the crypto wars of the 1990s, when strong encryption was also a Munition), the US government takes quite a strict view towards the consideration of online-available source code as "export."

Print it in a book and take the physical copy with you on a plane, iirc that was how they did it with GPG back in the day because 1st amendment protection.

Been a while so I might be wrong.

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