 Thank you. Thank you for the kind of deduction. I will be talking tonight as it's obvious about rocket science and if it's hard how hard can it be and My assistant here mr. Cyan deep Sean Khan. He will later speak about some meteorological experiments I myself. I'm an physicist and as a physicist and The work we do in rocket science in the FIR is purely Amateur rocketry as you would call it. We are not pursuing any financial gains We are just doing it because we want to do it. We want to know what is going on with this Okay, so what is rocket science? It may be something that is really complicated to understand and to learn. That's what they all say Oh, no, it's not rocket science is just a cinnamon for saying that's really easy So in reality, it's to design build-and-fly rockets, of course And that's what we do and if you do it more sophisticatedly with a lot of money. We call it aerospace engineering So why would you do that? I mean it's a lot of time and money and resources you think yeah, why do it? Yeah, maybe you're just curious can we do it? Is it possible? It was what had driven the first pioneers because it was totally unknown if you could reach space using a rocket at first Then of course, there's this main driver behind this rocket science Which is technology where you want to achieve something like project something on somebody else. You know what I mean and For me as a scientist as a physicist is very interesting to see all these space-born instruments giving us data that we're not Achievable from the ground especially in the infrared and for philosophers It's just a treasure growth thinking about the vastness of space and what it means for us as human beings So of course if you can get to space why not travel? Why don't not go to other places in our solar system like other planets asteroids or comets? You all have heard about the land affiliate that has landed last month on Churyumov-Gerasimenko 67 p and I can say this name very well because I've been working on this project and right now I'm very proud to say that This lender that has touched down on the comet has my work my name on it So thank you So space travel leads immediately to exploration, so there are other spaces Locations around this whole a system or even beyond that would like to go to and explore that is look at it Measure in there in situ or bring back stuff to measure it here And of course if you do it this for a long time, maybe in the future we can do colonization So we can go there to stay and to survive on the long run So these can be your motivations. Maybe you have another tell me if you find something else. I would be interested so motivation Now let's come to the free modern Rocket scientists. They were in ancient times Chinese rocket scientists. They're not well known, but they were there But they were not very successful It's a long story But today we'll talk about the free rocket tears as I call them Which is the first one is Konstantin Edward which Tsiolkov ski who lived from the 1860s to 1935 and He was a poor guy because in the age of 10 when he was playing outside in Russian winter He got scarlet fever and it left him almost deaf. So all his life. He was Yeah deaf almost so we came a bibliophilic autodidact because he had to drop out of school with 14 because the teacher couldn't get through to him I mean yelling all the time at a pupil is very difficult for the teacher also So he started to read a lot by himself and he went to Moscow In a library where he met philosopher called Fyodorov and he taught him a lot of things and and He read you there, especially these Two little stories called from the earth to the moon and the other one around the moon Which is a story about a free man being shot by a cannon to the moon and going around it's the first science fiction story that Talks about lunar voyages and it inspired him very fast He understood that it was not possible this way anyway he became a mathematics and physics teacher even death and He was tolerated by his environment meaning that he ran around mumbled something is here as the old crook No problem. Let him let him talk and nobody understood what we was talking about He did aerodynamic experiments in wind tunnel So he built them by himself and he developed something that we would call today at Zeppelin full metal But the Russians didn't understand it. They didn't get it. The authorities wouldn't help them And he became a philosopher in a branch is today called Cosmism very interesting branch if you want Read it up. So the second one is Robert Hutchington Goddard and He lived a little later than Seolkovsky Unfortunately, he died very young due to cancer and he had also a very fragile health Which leads to voracious reading and he was inspired by HG Wells. I'm pretty sure he also read Jules Verne But we know from his diary that he was especially impressed by HG Wells He became a physics professor which give gave him some autonomy and funding but during his lifetime was ridiculed by newspapers, especially by the New York Times and When Apollo 11 landed on the moon the same day they for the first time apologized in The New York Times for being so bad to mr. Goddard He invented and flew the first liquid propelled rocket the first that this earth has ever seen and Believe it or not since 1930 had a workshop in Roswell, New Mexico Yeah, I can't change it. It's the way it is and he was sponsored by Mr. Guggenheim and In the end of his life, he accumulated more than 200 patents that were important for rocketry That's a number Anyway, the third one closer to home mr. Hermann Julius Obatt He was also inspired by Jules Verne and his father. He was a medic Shirook, he wanted him to study medicine So he went to study medicine, but then World War one broke out and he got wounded in 1950 in Carpets and When he saw all this blood and everything he saw no, I cannot I can't continue medicine It's not possible. So he switched to physics math and astronomy, which has much less blood And he became a physics math and chemistry teacher and a gymnasium, but he was very restless and started to think about rockets and His ideas that he put forward in the early 1920s were violently opposed by so-called scientists that said what he was thinking about was totally utopian and not possible and He was a total loon. Anyway He developed the first German liquid rocket engine just a few years later 1930 it was the first test together with his pupil Werner von Braun that some of you may know and Interesting enough. He was a philosopher and parapsychologist. Oh, yes so now a few important points in the lives of these three rocket tears that we know of and One that we know very precisely because he kept a very nice diary is Goddard's epiphany Sitting on a charity on the 19th of October of 1899 he has just read H.E. Wells war of the worlds and had some chores to do outside and instead of doing the chores He went on the territory where he thought about and He said that it was one of the quiet colorful afternoons of sheer beauty Which we have in October in New England and as I look towards the fields at the east I imagine how wonderful it would be to make some device which had even the possibility of ascending to Mars and How it would look on a small scale if sent up from the meadow at my feet. I Was a different boy when I descended the tree from when I ascended for existence at least seemed very purposive So here we have a clear case Where a single moment in life changes everything for this man? then Another very important point this time for mr. Tsiolkovsky Was the first publication called the exploration of cosmic spades by means of reactive devices also known as rockets This image you see here is an early sketch It's not from the book yet a refined version there But it's very difficult to get the book because it's in Russian and you don't get it in digital from easily So he said in this book that straights travel is feasible, which was totally preposterous at that time Recall propulsion is needed to move in vacuums or had it figured out Gunpowder is not energetic enough for propulsion and remember that since the 12th century Every single rocket that I know of had been built with gunpowder And he said but there are liquids sufficiently energetic. So there is a loophole Even if gunpowder is not good enough. There are the liquids that can do it And he also named them for example liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen would be an ideal propellant combination And this is very interesting because liquid hydrogen had been synthesized only a few years before in Small quantities and he was thinking about burning it in tons and tons of stuff where one kilo would cost like a million euros okay, so who was way way ahead of his time and As is the case with such pioneers nobody understood what he had written in this treaties Well anyway 20 years past and mr. Obot Published a book first he tried to write a dissertation in Götting where he was studying astrophysics astronomy. It was called in that day and He called it rocket to planetary spaces Diracated to the planet one and his professor mr. Wachs Wolff said well, it seems all quite well But it has nothing to do with astronomy So no, I cannot pass this dissertation So he went on and published it as a book and later on got a little bit more thesis for this book and this book was read throughout Germany and Spread to other parts of the world and in the end this book made that these three rocket tears knew each other So what did he write in this book? It is possible to build a visor can go beyond the atmosphere is very similar to what Seolkovsky found 20 years earlier These devices will reach velocities to leave earth gravity. Well again preposterous and such devices will be able to transport humans impossible so and this was The really important prophecy the realization of these devices will be feasible in the next decades This is quite well knowing that we landed on the moon like 46 years later So another very important point was Goddard's invention of liquid propulsion the first flight was on 16th of March of 1926 and He used gasoline and liquid oxygen The tank indeed was below the burning chamber Totally atypical to today's design. So the burning chamber is this little black thing up there And then we have the laval nozzle the laval nozzle here, which was totally new which wasn't used before it pays out to be physics professor sometimes and It has an specific impulse about 170 which is almost a double of gunpowder not very good compared to modern Engines, but anyway, he only reached 56 meters and it lasted 2.5 seconds to reach this height Well, unfortunately, there was a camera running, but before the rocket could lift off Yeah Film was empty. So no movie You know that moment, right? You really get something right and then no, sorry, but you didn't press the button Okay, that happened to mr. Goddard too, so Okay, let's talk about foundations. What do we need to? Make rocketry to be a rocket science, of course mathematics and mathematics is everywhere. I don't have to tell you linear equations I get back equations differential equations calculus integration everything else and some specialized things too So mathematics is very basic then of course physics Although we don't need very sophisticated physics as a classical one so classical mechanics Classical gravitational theory, of course if you get close to planets and moons, maybe you need some extension of the normal point like theory But this is not really complicated Then and this is for the pyromaniacs here. We need thermodynamics because this is a theory of combustion yeah, so combustion is today very important especially for high thrust engines and This is almost I mean everybody knows this. Yeah, we have the burning chamber here Where the combustion takes place and then this is this bell like bell shaped? Nozzle that expands the gas and by expanding the gas Transforms the inner energy into kinetic energy of the gas thereby propelling the rocket in the other direction Then of course aerodynamics at least as long as you stay within the atmosphere This is very important because this is the main force on the rocket Yeah, if you have seen rocket launches. There's always this point of max q max q means that the rocket is At the point where the most forces is acting on this is very dangerous at the point and after that it gets down so Aerodynamics very important very complicated to all with the mechanics once you reach space You will have to understand very very good Where you are and where you're going so all with the mechanics and Maneuvering otherwise you won't reach a target you intend this is for example the directories of Voyager 1 and 2 Which was really pure luck to get so many planets in one shot Now you have to launch it at the right time. Otherwise. It's not possible Then you need a lot of mechanic engineering So this is today much easier than it was like 40 years ago. We have today cat cam We have CNC milling machines and less and everything so much easier and much easier to reproduce Especially because our materials today are more Yeah, if they say it's aluminum. It's aluminum. It's not just some crap Yeah, so we need a lot of metal working now milling milling drilling whatever and This is coming now more into focus. You will use composite materials if you need a lightweight structure that is sturdy enough It's more complicated than than cutting metal, but it's really lightweight. It pays off then of course electronics everything that will fly on a rocket will have to be very light and Consume not too much energy. Otherwise the batteries will be too big This is prohibitive. I mean, we're not in the Apollo era anymore. We don't need hundreds or thousands of watts to run a computer and In this I don't have to tell you we need a lot of software today in the beginning The first rockets were launched without digital computers. They were launched with analog computers So called Mischgerät was the first of them and there was not one single line of code. Remember that they flew the first rockets with that until The Apollo program the Apollo program was the first one that really used digital technology and Very important once the rocket is gone and normally they are gone very very fast. The only way to get your data is through telemetry No other way around Okay, now let's see How rocketry works the principle of every rocket is a so-called recoil principle That states and this is direct Result from the homogeneity of space neuter theory The total momentum of a closed system appears constant for an inertial server or with Newton if there are no forces The total momentum doesn't change So if you look at a rocket at a certain time and the next moment It expels a little bit of mass with a relative velocity you so this is a velocity minus you in relation of The center of gravity of the rest of the system Yeah, so you go from here to there, of course It's a continuous, but just think about agents flying away So anyway, if you say that this is conserved then the total momentum in this moment has to be equal to the Total momentum in this moment and this leads to the simple equation. I know Equations make people run away This one and if you look at it very very close you see it's much easier as this one So if you divide it by the time delta TB you get a differential equation Can you integrate yada yada yada and you get to Tsiolkovsky's formula? He found that in 1800 something so it's not complicated at all. Yeah No, no really It's not wrong. It's wrong. Okay so Well, this thing that I call delta V that stands here This is the only thing that you really have to remember delta V is somehow proportional to this expulsion velocity and some logarithmic of the ratio of beginning and end mass, okay? So this one here is technologically given by the engine you have This is a velocity given by a gas expulsion for example It's in the order of between a thousand meters per second to a maximum of five thousand meters per second If you use electric Engines you can go much higher but with with chemistry you're bound to this expulsion and the second term here The lighter the rockets gets after the burn the higher the total term gets but because of the logarithm the effect is very small But anywhere you will try it So what what do we need delta V for? You need it to get from one place in our solar system to another because to get from one orbit to another You need a certain delta V who of you plays Kerbal space program Okay, so Very good. Very good. Yeah, my little son does too My wife doesn't like it anyway So to get from the earth to low earth orbit you need an exorbitant amount of up to 10 kilometers per second That's why it's so complicated to get off the earth Once you are on low earth orbit. It's relatively cheap to get to other let's say to geotransfer orbit is 2.5 So only one fourth Yeah, and from there to Mars. It's just adding up these ones. It's not that much Okay, it's still something but not that much as going from the earth to low earth orbit So getting to low earth orbit is the real challenge once you are there You have all the time in the world you can use a very very little engine This is just very efficient and you get where you want, okay? But getting to low earth orbit. This is this is the lesson you have to learn. That's complicated Okay to get there normally one stage is not enough So you use two or several stages and then just this delta V just adds up Yeah, so this is the first stage and You start with the mass M zero and at the end of the burn You have the mass M one and then the next stage to start with M one and the rest is M two And this has to be as large as possible So you spend every time a lot of mass and that's why as I turn five rocket looks very big at the beginning and very small At the end, okay, so Now let's talk about our projects Why would we even do that? So far our case for the FIR We want to make testing on sub orbital flights and we kind of got into orbit now It's impossible with the resources we have but we can test it on sub orbital flights It means we just fly to let's say ten kilometers or even only two kilometers And then we can test all the stuff that is needed for a real flight like telemetry avionics Everything it doesn't change. It's just a bigger rocket in the end Then even if you do only go to a few kilometers of height You have almost minutes of zero or microgravity so you can do really interesting experiments without going into space and What we really want to do is cross the common line because at that moment the common line is at 100 kilometers It's just a definition. There's no real line there. You can go up there and look. There's nothing anyway What one day we just thought okay when we're are we in space? It is 60 kilometers. No, it's 80 120 Mmm, let's take a round number. Let's take 100 kilometers and that's the common line Normally you say a common line is defined by There is no There is no possibility that the plane can stay up there. You need a rocket So and what is very important too is meteorological in-situ measurements and they I want to switch to my colleague Sean because he is the meteorologist Yeah, Mike Thank you, David greetings. Ladies and gentlemen So why David has already mentioned that rockets are one of the possible Means to access the interplanetary space and you can do some kind of science and interplanetary space We can also do some really interesting science Without going to the interplanetary space up to an height of maybe 8 to 10 kilometers That is the upper limits of the troposphere In fact, you do not even have to go to 10 kilometers It just go to 5 kilometers and you can do really interesting stuff. Let us take a look what we can do there Just know No though Here I have coated a line from a paper from van der Leij Martens and this paper was published in the atmospheric chemistry and physics journal, which is an opens Open-access journal from the European Geological Union and there he writes that unfortunately all the matters that we have today Including to this radius on this including to the satellites and radar methods They are not enough to study for example a cloud Particularly he Emphasizes that the thermodynamics that is happening in the top part of the cloud which is eliminated by the solar radiation is Entirely different than what is happening in the bottom side or the side parts of the cloud which is not eliminated and Thereby you have entirely different thermodynamic phases entirely different dynamics of water vapor condensating and again Again vaporizing and this can have really Deciding effects on the climate system of this planet. Why this is important for us because if any one of you have read the report of IPCC and the last one and the one before that you will see that the Steuity that we have on our knowledge about the aerosol systems more specifically on clouds is really really low if you want a quantification then the amount of error is in the order of 300 percent and therefore Investigating aerosol systems or more specifically investigating clouds and The Indirect effects how they influence the albedo of the planet is really important in order to predict what the planet is going to look Like in the next years or in the next decades and how the climate system is going to be affected by that Why rockets make a very interesting and a very perfect way of investigating that will be cleared from this picture This is an investigation done by NASA. This is called Greece as the country of Greece But this stands for ground to rocket electrical something correlation experiment and How what you can see here is that rocket is delivering a sonde directly inside an aura so the Important part here is that a rocket can do really precise sonde delivery really precise instrument delivery And this is why this is really interesting Then we can deliver a device on the top of the cloud or even on the bottom of the cloud And then we can use these two devices to investigate what has not been investigated yet In order to do that we do not need really big rockets First let us take a look at this rocket. This is a sounding rocket called javelin this was developed to study the upper atmosphere more specifically the ionosphere and The ionization properties of the atmosphere so that the Americans could develop radio communication technologies more Efficiently, but we will not need that kind of rockets will need much smaller much low flying rockets And dr. Madlina will tell you more about such kind of rockets and their flight properties Thank you So as you have seen Sean is very passionate about clouds So this is a typical can set this is not our cancer This is just one can set is very small satellites really as big as it can nothing more And you can today with modern microchip once you can put something in it that can measure whatever you like Yeah, I mean there are so many sensors today Just go on the internet and search for Arduino or whatever and you get for 50 bucks You get so much that you can yeah make like 10 concepts Anyway, so what what what do we want to do and how do we do it our philosophy at FIR is to keep it simple stupid with or without comma So we use solid rocket engines mainly we are also working on hybrids, but they are a little bit more complex So solid rocket engines is what we have used the last nine years and They are based on something we call candy Actually, you can really eat the ingredients. I wouldn't recommend to eat it in block, but it's sugar It's Salt that you normally put in in meat so it doesn't get bad a little bit of charcoal, which is not good for the taste and iron oxide Which is more healthy? Anyway, we use always common materials. So we use aluminum. We use steel. We use multiplex wood. We use PVC whatever you don't need something exotic like magnesium aluminum, whatever. Yeah, it's not necessary Sometimes we use also glass fiber Carbon fiber is nice, but it's very difficult to handle. It's bad for your lungs and it's very expensive So we don't do that We use standard manufacturing techniques or milling drilling the lathe turning These are allowed and we always use a low budget. So none of our rockets is more expensive Let's say two kilo euro Yeah, this is this is our budget for one rocket Of course a lot of money goes into all this running around going to Denmark or wherever But the rocket itself. It's very cheap and to keep the budget even lower We built them to be reusable. So parachutes Okay so what have you done in the last Years this is from 2005. It's called Aguna one was a nice little rocket three meters long 16 centimeters diameters like this and it could fly to almost one kilometer and This is a flight in I think 2006 or seven This is pure candy as you can see from the white smoke This is soda soda powder Essentially mmm and you don't see a flame There's a flame is very small because this is doesn't burn very hot and has some specific impulse around 140 which is not very good But it's extremely cheap like one kilo costs us like two euros and in this on this rocket It's just to keep two kilos or so so Rock to building rock to build rockets and to fly them That's not the expensive part expensive part is to get there and to get the permission to do it That's more expensive today at least so this is a Aguna two which was built a year later and Was trimmed to be very fast. It has a diameter of only 11 centimeters here as Slightly larger motor and it get getting up to about two and a half Kilometers with the median motor the big motor was never used a big motor So the aft part is the motor so the medium motor is like from here to here That's all and the the big motor the end motor that we never use would go up to here Yeah, and we did never use it because it hadn't the permission to go up to six seven kilometers That's the only problem we had at the time Anyway, we flew it a few times. This is also again a normal candy as you can see from the white smoke then we built in 2008 the Aguna three which is Not very much larger, but very much thicker as you can see is this 20 centimeters diameter So you can pack a lot of stuff inside it and because we Understood that with the Aguna two which was very fast was very difficult to put anything inside But at the time we had no arduinos Now it's not a problem anymore Anyway in flight. It's a slightly different because this year is what we call Suka Super candy, which is a mixture. Yeah, it's not my invention. It's invention of dr. Echel which has a patent on it. He's a member of our club and the pattern is just to To protect it so no one can can take it away so everybody can use it. It's essentially Candy with a lot of aluminum powder like 200 micron powder and it goes really as it has like 170 seconds specifically impulse. So it's a lot of more power behind it Okay, so in 2008 2009 we thought about okay now we build free rockets, but we want to go higher like 10 kilometers or so and We had contact with the Danish club called the Danish space challenge that operate from little little town close to our house and Then we had a motor I we will see it later in action Here this this section here. This is the motor this upper section was a recovery section here upwards of the avionics bay We made it short after that this year It's the ramp that we built for Poland But then Poland was so dry that we couldn't go it was in 2011 They they called us like one week before we were ready. We wanted to go to Poland and They said no, you can come why not? It hasn't rained in like four weeks and your rocket will ignite our woods. So sorry. Sorry guys next year. Maybe Anyway So let's talk about part reduction. I've told you that we use normal manufacturing methods So this is a laugh and after a while it looks like this. Yeah, so this is for the motor the upper compartment the adapter and these are the parts the couplers and For the avionics beta separation coupler, so these are the normal couplers for the for the tubes and this here is for the motor They were manufactured in 2010 And then we had to make holes in it I mean you take a drill you make holes in it, right? But you have to be very precise. That's not very easy So what you see here is a stepping motor which you can give Impulses so it turns a certain angle. Otherwise, it will be imprecise. You cannot do it by hand. It's impossible Again milling milling milling this takes a lot of time so to mill a fin like this it takes like four or five hours This is the nozzle combined with the enclosure. So Here you see the graphite part graphite is really very very nice to handle. Of course, it's brittle, but It's self-smearing so you don't have to use any lubricant during the procedures and this is modeled from from The other side so you can see here the throat of the nozzle where the hot gases go through and don't touch this after test It's really hot So let's talk about our launch campaign in 2014 our colleagues from DSC Had the courtesy to bring us over our materials that we left there The Aguna four parts because we had to come from Cologne and Berlin and then Munich and so on and go all the way up to Denmark So taking the whole rocket every time up and down appeared a little futile so we left the rocket in 2013 there and they told us no problem. We will bring it by and that's what they brought us on Monday And we were scheduled to launch on Saturday. Okay, so we were like oops. What do we do now? But the Danish space challenge is up for a challenge. So Danish soldering challenge They really within within a few hours. They could repair it By soldering. This is dual. This is not very easy. It's very brittle material. They soldered it using using nitrogen gas together again, of course, we were a little bit Astonished that too. I could break so easily. So we removed all the paintings and then Use fiberglass to reinforce it again. So we were there for one week before the launch We came there on on a Sunday on Monday. We were brought all the stuff from DSC Modulo the fin and then we started to integrate so we integrate for a whole week this rocket. This was one step This is the Avionics Bay the upper Avionics Bay We can see here on the upper is this antenna. This is just for testing a real antenna would be more on top This is an RFM 12 BP module from Hope RF Half a watt and 70 centimeters very powerful here below. There are sensors Gyroscopes and accelerometer and here below. It's a data processing unit simple microcontroller a PH x32 a if somebody Wants to know so this is another view from upwards so you can see again here the power module The RF power module. This is just a voltage regulator. And this was the antenna for the tests So this is during integration. So these are just two simple lipo's. Yeah, it's very simple Just put them on top and what you can see here is some cables running down to an ADC down at the data processing unit because We tried to launch this rocket like three times and every time something else happened the first time The batteries ran out on us. So we had it on the ramp. Everything was ready and then no telemetry came we said what what happened and It was just that the battery died on us It was the first time in Tarnum in the north part of Denmark the second time this the Dane's Switch the place where they wanted to launch to the Mindegap which is in the southern part of Denmark and There is very very fine sand white fine sand and indeed There is a location very close to the Mindegap, which is called Videsande, which is white sands If anybody knows what that is So we long we tried to launch on white sands But then they got with their truck on this white sand and it just sank Boop into the sand and they had to call a crane to get it out again. So no launch at this day Anyway, so this is after integration and you can see the look in the eyes. Finally, it's done Yeah, it was like several hours This is on the beach again the very fine sand here on the left our meteorologist here on the right the other ones and On the beach you really have to work inside a tent because you cannot you cannot work in the wind and in the sand Everything gets full of sand. I mean this sand is really strange You get full of it like everything is full of it and then you go off the the beach make like this and it's gone Yeah, it's so fine that it goes into everything especially into your mechanical parts and Lubrication this is the antenna. This is a circularly Polarized antenna very nice for 70 centimeters. We are two of them. This is one ground station So we receive telemetry over this antenna that goes directly to laptop and you can see the stream in real time so these are the three parts again the tip here avionics parts with telemetry and The recovery part which is a co2 cartridge which is ejected at the highest point or should have been ejected at the highest point This is the motor Yeah, I come to this. This is the motor With the 18 kilograms of sugar giving about 1.2 Tons of thrust for about three seconds, which gives the rocket an acceleration at burnout of about 30 g So it's fast. Yeah, you count to three. It's gone. I mean literally gone and this is the recovery section with the parachutes and of course as We are oversee a buoy or better said there were two buoys, but only one word anyway This is a launch So it's very impressive and I want to show you on video. Just have to start it up First of all, oh no first first. I show you the motor This was a test performed in 2009 Why we just thinking about the Aguna 4 so there was a test that didn't work out in 2008 So this is a setup very simple if you look at it You can find everything in your normal hardware store except maybe the graphite nozzle. That's really difficult to get but anyway So this is dr. Ekel if you look closely he's missing one finger on his right hand and Yeah, he says he will never again touch chlorates never Yeah, he works for this he lives for this So he was he's a chemistry chemist by by profession and he worked for as director of the bayon chimi And so he knows what he does. Yeah, but even professionals can get sometimes Yeah mutilated and he's also a slightly deaf on one ear, so That's why I always say please stop doing solid rockets But nobody can stop this man So we are in a field. I think it's somewhere in Bavaria. I don't remember exactly Can we get sound on this? Yeah, put a little louder This so far is very slow and that's we have a reason why it's so slow Which has it at bum it has this bum certification with is in Germany we say without bum no boom, okay? This is very important. You are not allowed to use such pyrotechnics without the proper registration everything so dr. Ekel has the certificate to manufacture that kind of stuff and Of course as I said he had problems with chlorates, so he switched to nitrates and nitrates are also very Volatile so they tested this motor and they found out that the sucker is extremely sturdy That is you can go at it with a hammer you take it the piece of Sucker you take a hammer and you can Really club it don't try this with any combustible rocket fuel. Yeah, but this one is really really very slow That's why it takes so long until it gets started. You really need the motor to build up the pressure until it goes and when it goes tell you Okay, so first of all, I will show you the This is a test of the ejection system of the recovery system, so it will put out the parachute So this is in real time. It will be slightly fast, so we'll stop it when it's out So that was it. Yeah, so this happens in midair in the highest point It just ejects through co2 and what we see here. Well, this is avionics and the here connected to a shock band and a carabine this is a Drogue chute from a drone called CL 289, which is very cheap like 10 euro, but it's of the best materials are amit and Here down here you have the buoy The one that got destroyed but one buoy another one is in the in the lower section So there is one shock band that goes down to the lower section and at a proper time or height to be more Precise of 400 meters a second pyro Resolves a junction down there so the main chute can get out the second buoy So and this can be shown also in slow motion, so you can really appreciate what's happening there Please look for the co2 snow. I think I have to This is really slow Takes a lot of time. I think this is a casio FX one. I don't know. I don't remember Just to the end now Okay, so this is what happens in slow motion. We made a lot of tests and this was what very very spectacular during daytime We did some tests during nighttime So this is the launch itself This is slow motion. I tell you this is slow motion. This is like half the speed of the real rocket Bye-bye and reality is like where did it go? Well, it was very funny this day because we had we had at beginning we had blue skies Really nice weather and then the clouds came and then our Danish friends from Danish space sharing They had also a rocket a little smaller one not too small, but not that fast And it went into the cloud and in the cloud something happened like boom and then on the same trajectory The rocket fell down So as if the cloud would have Munch it up or something and then this one got up and we got nice telemetry But it went down and we never found it again at that day at that day So we're a little sad, but we had the telemetry So we were glad and sad at the same moment glad because finally we could launch the rocket and this said because we couldn't Take it home, but two days ago later when we were there on On a Sunday think about nothing a mail came in and said look what the cat dragged in and There our rocket was again. It had survived with one beauty and It was in in Danish newspapers everything rocket found at whatever site and we don't know where it comes from Yeah But but the chairman of DSC is a journalist no problem his press lease was flawless flawless Anyway, so That's what we have been doing now. We we will try to To refit the Aguna 4 which is now in Denmark using a dart to go even higher This one reached 6.5 kilometers. I could show you all the telemetry, but it's not really very interesting It takes a lot of time, but if somebody's interested, please ask Mmm, and this will be our next rocket. Okay, there are no lengths But this is like the same length as the Aguna 4 like 4.5 meters But like 30 centimeters diameter or so 20 to 30 centimeters It's called the Aguna 5 and we have already a mock-up not to fly in version in the sense that it will go like 50 kilometers Hi, but a mock-up that will go up to about two kilometers just to test everything aerodynamics and so on Okay, so that's for today, please if you have questions David and Sean thank you very much for this very very impressive speech So now we have question answers. We have 10 minutes. So please line up behind the microphones We have three over here and three over here While you're lining up. Is there any questions from the IRC? Yes one question was are there any restrictions or on height or Size of a rocket that you can launch on your backyard or anything or are you restricted and it is forbidden? Are there any restrictions well How can I put this? We are in Germany actually, we have been trying to launch rockets from a military Ground since 2006 which is now let me see well wait eight years and they Granted it is on eight of December of this year to launch two rockets so we launch rockets in bomb holder you may have been reading it otherwise Google it bomb holder FIR you will find it and Yes, there are a lot of restriction. We had 31 restrictions to launch in a military place So think about launching it in your backyard Of course if you go to Denmark, it's a totally different matter. They just ask you is this a rocket. Yeah Okay, and Don't leave the space. Okay So it's much much much easier, but of course The bigger the rockets get I mean the rockets years just show one two and three They're really model rockets. I mean they look like big rockets, but they only fly up to 2.5 kilometers This is still a model rocket. Yeah, I'm gonna for something totally different. I remember this Danish woman standing there First having watched their own rocket and then the second one they are gonna fall and she's a set without thinking wow That's a real rocket That made me very happy. Anyway Did us quest this question fully answered? Yeah. Okay. Thank you David our gentleman on number two, please Okay, first you ask in the beginning for for further reasons to go to space and I came up with one actually Because you may need to earlier or rather. Hopefully later But my real question is Some technical details about the rocket you mentioned it right now. It's rather a model rocket And it doesn't really go to a space yet And I'm wondering Yeah, what the next steps are especially because I Guess you will not get into space with sugar alone well We don't want to but there are people there's project called sugar shot to space as as to as They really try it by having problem because candy. This is sugar Propellant has one drawback. It's edible, but it has run war back It's brittle. So if you make large grains let about 12 centimeters diameter starts the problem start that when you start Up the engine and the pressure peak comes up Then some of the grains may break and if a grain break that means that the area the burning area Will vary very fast which will produce a pressure spike which will make a faster reaction which will produce more pressure will You guess it Okay, the next question is you mentioned the price To those euros and I wondered what the maximum weight is you can transport up to well What a gunoff for you mentioned will go 10 kilometers high. What's the payload you can transport there? Yeah, we are we are aiming for the thing is the the rocket is really really heavy now We make it that heavy because we cannot go that high. So last time we had 30,000 feet Which is approximately 9.1 kilometers of ceiling so we didn't want to make a very Agile rocket very very High-going rocket. Yeah, so we were happy that it stayed below 7 kilometers as you have to have some margin Otherwise, they don't believe you that you really know anyway We could transport like 5 kilos or so at the moment Of course, there's not enough space unless you put in steel or something. So Something like 2 kilograms more realistic. Yeah, that's totally enough for a lot of avionics Okay, and my last question is about testing It's quite difficult to test the software which goes high there if if it Is expected to experience in excess of what 40 G's of acceleration? I guess you do not test this in the lab before Well, yes, you can test it It has more than 40 G's when it hits the ground Try it. Okay, but it's not okay Probably Okay, David. Thank you our gentleman at number one, please Yes, and couple space program. I learned you need some kind of control for the rocket. So it doesn't veer off Did I miss that part or can you explain how you control? We destroy on the arcade a function here. Yeah Control control. Well, we would like to control it. The problem is that As I said keep it simple Stupid so at the moment no control Of course, the rocket is stable. Yeah, so it doesn't go anywhere. We don't want it to but it's it's it's passively Controlled on its trajectory. So you once put the ramp up and you aim for the direction And that's it and because they accelerate so fast. They are immediately stable. Yeah, the the Momentum cord is like Half a meter. So there is absolutely no motion. It's like straight arrow and Of course, we would like to control it But what's the point at the moment at the moment? There's no point because we have we have solid rocket motors that burn out in three seconds. So after that, what do you want to control? No motor burning anymore It's another thing if you have hybrids which accelerate with like only 2g or even lower Then your rocket is totally unstable and you need control and there's no way around it So what we will do is take this very nice o-motor propel it to 30 g's up to 1.7 mach and then put a little Dart on top with a little hybrid motor. So it's stable Yeah, so we can go up to 10 to 20 kilometers without new technology or almost no new technology Yeah, thank you number two, please Um You maintain that there are laws in Germany You say it without them no boom or something. Um, if you build hybrid motors Are they restrictions to or how does it work in Germany? There are no restrictions Anything from IRC, okay, um number two, please I've seen people using balloons To do measurements That sounds a lot cheaper and easier. It's a lot less spectacular, but why aren't you using them? That's the point. That's the point. It's less spectacular number one number one The thing is of course balloons are very easy to get like to 30 to 40 kilometers of height That's true And if you really want to just go up to this height use balloons, it's okay The thing is don't expect it to come back Number one or it's really difficult to get it back. Okay, rockets are sometimes also difficult to locate. I know We have lost some of them or but we always found them in the end like a few weeks later or so So balloons are a nice thing and we wanted to do it, but we just hadn't had the time It's all you can use balloons no problem at all Yeah, but don't expect to go to 100 kilometers not possible Yeah in the long run. Yeah, but balloons are a nice thing Unless you want to launch rockets from balloons, which I don't recommend Okay, number one, please Once you get the sensors up to the height that you want You're only gonna get if you don't have anything to keep them there one or two seconds at most of readings Can you comment on? You need to have a sensor that is fast enough with a sample rate of let's say 10 Hertz or so Then you will have in this two or three seconds like 20 to 30 data points. What do you need more? I Mean how long do you want to stay up there? Take a balloon if you want to stay up there longer It's a valid point the thing is the thing is using a rocket you get the profile and almost instantaneous profile of all the measurable Observables from the ground to the top Fast with a balloon you take several minutes to half an hour to get off through all of this And you get it twice up and down Yeah, sure Well, there's one more thing The delivery of the device is very very precise So if you have a particular cloud layer for example you want to investigate then you will not use a balloon because the crosswinds may drive The balloon somewhere else somewhere far away from your cloud or somewhere far away from your Hollywood soon You'll use a rocket which will directly deliver your device where you want it to be Yeah Okay, thank you number two, please Yes, if you use GPS with your rockets, does it actually maintain a lock on the signal? That's a real problem with the Aguna for I didn't tell you The thing is that the Aguna for Was a full metal jacket so no GPS receiving and it went up to six point five kilometers and We anticipated to go up to like seven point five fish, but it didn't Because the drag was higher than anticipated, but that's why you do the flight, right? You don't know everything. I read it was a really complicated, especially such a strange rocket. It's very very strange ratio of length to diameter and So the GPS receiver was inside this full metal jacket So no signal at all and our idea was while it comes down We'll find a fix because we had calculated you had three minutes to get a fix Okay in theory The problem was that when it opened it opened like ten seconds too late because somehow we don't know why the avionics to avionics Computer did not detect the highest point. This is a software problem We are not responsible because this stuff was bought, okay? It was the only the only equipment that was not made in-house, okay, and it failed So we have learned that lessons we will made our own avionics the next time anyway It fell like for 10 seconds and you can imagine if you let something fall for 10 seconds It has like 360 kilometers per hour and then it opened like you saw there in mid-air and The parachute the drogue chute was especially designed for such a case Otherwise it was just ripped into thousand pieces. So it just ripped at one point and The rocket fell faster than expected So after 120 seconds of full telemetry and the first fix showing up because we saw the time It fell into the water So we had no data but in principle if you put on a fiberglass red dome from the beanie what we do next time Then you will get to fix At least during the time he recovers from this very fast as and because of course this is beyond the parameters of normal GPS systems there are people That have Pimped up GPS system may be sitting here in the room. Yeah, yeah, if somebody thinks about this Come to us Really interesting device. Okay. Thank you some question from IRC. Yeah, there was another question What are your problems or points against using? The balloons instead of the rockets No, no, I have no points against using balloons instead of rockets They are just totally different the one is very Pointy and the one is very round and the one goes very fast. Yeah, they're very slow Yeah, I have only one problem Launching rockets from balloons because pointy and round no good. Okay Okay, three more questions. So we start over there number one You spoke about sensors. Maybe I didn't get it, but could you please explain a little bit more about the sensors? You're using and what do you do with the data and maybe you can especially comment on whether you thought about Plugging a camera on your rocket. What was the last part a camera? Yeah. Yeah, we had a camera. It was lost It was lost during integration. It's worse. It's worse. We had the camera there We had the space there in the Vionics Bay and We don't know exactly what happened. Somehow the USB connector got loose and it was destroyed We tried everything to revive it, but it was dead and we couldn't get a new one because it was Do you have a movie of that? Of the destruction of the camera So that the camera filmed until its end. No, no, no, no Before the launch during integration the camera was destroyed by integrating it So we now know that we need the backup camera. Okay Okay, no, but but the question of the sensors is of course Interesting we use inertial measurement sensors, which are totally common nowadays. You can buy them like 10 degree 10 degree of freedom sensor boards on the internet for like 15 euros where you have a Gyroscope with all free axis the accelerometer And the barometer and We also use the module which goes up to 24g all free axis additionally So you can you can follow the trajectory of the rocket and this was was was on board Of course the most important thing for the highest the barometric sensor, which was a BMA 180 of Bosch which has calibration on board and everything very nice temperature compensation and extremely cheap So there are the sensors too, but they are so dead cheap today. It's just No comparison to like 10 years ago where you really had to make a bridge and very high Sophisticated 24 bit AD or whatever. Yeah, it's very very cheap today. So we had Just trajectory measurements or inertial measurements and the pressure and we wanted to do also measurements of the temperature on the tip But that didn't work out because we had a problem with the antenna We had to change this and there was a temperature on the tip because there would you would have this stagnation Temperature and from that you can also deduce the speed of the rocket relative to the atmosphere Yeah, so these are the typical of those that we use at the beginning and of course later on we want to use more meteorological observables So you are Storing the data of that sensors On-site what luckily we didn't otherwise we wouldn't have had one bite No, we send it directly his dream downwards on 70 centimeter band It's not a lot of bandwidth. That's why we don't have too much data. It's like That 30 kilohertz or so on bandwidth and we send just enemy our sentences downwards So like the GPS sentence you just get an ADC sentence and an emu sentence and so on and just stored on two separate locations on two laptops in real time and Of course, we have also an SD card on board where it is dreamed on but if this D card is lost It's lost. No, that's the problem. So you can reproduce every launch you do with the data. Yeah Sorry, we're running out of time. So one very short last question and then we have to close it here Right, I have a short question regarding propellant Something years ago. I read about Alice propellant consisting of ice water ice and aluminum powder Could I tell something about it? Yeah, sure. It's water and aluminum no, no, it's very fine aluminum and the principle with with with with sugar as sugar and This Alice is almost the same because as you know, carbohydrate It's just a carbon skeleton with a lot of water around it So what you do is that the water burns aluminum Well, and the carbon also takes a little bit of the water and then you have co2 aluminum oxide corant and a little bit of sodium Sodium carbonate and the thing with Alice is that it's really difficult to store So unless you go to the Arctic or Antarctic Not so practical. Yeah, because it has to be frozen. Then it's a nice propellant Yeah, I read a lot about it because it has a very high specific impulse and it's it's almost inert during handling So it's very nice, but It has to be cold really cold and this was like spring in Denmark. It's warm Okay, thank you David and Sean. Thank you very much for this very impression speech