 Hello everyone and welcome to Tomorrow Space Orbit 12.05. We're very excited for you to be here today because we have a very cool guest with Joe Bernard from BPS Space showing you some of the wild things that he is doing in the world of amateur rocketry. So once again this is Tomorrow Orbit 12.05. And I am Jared, head the host for today. You probably know me as the resident astronomer of Tomorrow and right next to me I've got Sarah Vincent who what are we calling you today? In a certain nickname here, you pick. Okay, yeah. What do I do? What am I? Yes, what should I be? We can bring it up to a community folks. Yeah, I'm up for that. And we do most everything with community folks. Sarah McSaraface would be hilarious. Okay. I'm just putting that out there. Sounds good. Sounds like a good new Twitter handle if you need it. Yeah. And then we have Athena. Hello. Athena, how the heck do you say your last name? Brentsburger. Brentsburger. So Athena Brentsburger and you are like our resident super like super stellar explosion expert here. Yes. So excellent stuff. And then all the way on the end, as we mentioned in our intro, we have Joe Bernard from BPS space today. And we're very excited to have you on the show here. I know I'm excited because I'm an amateur rocketeer myself and some of us here are amateur rocketeers. So I guess just to kind of start out a little bit, just kind of give us a little bit of background about yourself and maybe how you kind of got involved in rocketry. Yeah. So my name is Joe Bernard. Like you said, I run this company called BPS.space or BPS space. I don't really know like what to call it. That's the website though. And also the name. Anyway, we build these really advanced metal rocketry components. And I kind of just cut like I want to see how crazy advanced you can make these small scale rockets. A lot of times when rocketeers want to build like bigger things, you're an amateur rocketeer. Yes, bigger is better. Well, yeah. So that's like the common view that like a lot of people take. And actually, in a lot of ways, bigger is better. But you can also get really advanced at the model scale. If you start incorporating like guidance systems and things like that into your low power rockets, you can stay really safe and still learn a ton about how the real things get to orbit or get to wherever. So that's kind of what we do. I'm all self taught in it. So it's kind of also a journey of like, how much can I not mess up on like my path through learning this? But yeah, that's about it. I studied music. And then I saw what SpaceX was doing in 2015. And it was like, uh-oh, I picked the wrong career. Yeah. So then I picked up a bunch of textbooks and I just got to work. So you literally just like dive in the textbooks and that's how you learn physics behind all of this. It's also crazy. Like it sounds like a joke, but for real, there are a lot of YouTube tutorials that like work pretty well for real. Yeah. Excellent. So with this, did you also have to learn how to kind of like work with the hardware that came with it as well? Yep. So I'm not a mechanical engineer. I mean, at this point maybe, but like, I wasn't. And so I bought a 3D printer. I got like some CAD software. It's like, you know, computer aided design. And again, like YouTube tutorials, get you started pretty well. And then you just sort of try things, especially with like a 3D printer. You can iterate so many times, like, you know, print seven versions of the same part in the same day. And basically just like make it a little better each time. So it's really forgiving if you're not a good engineer to start. Yeah. Yeah. 3D printing, you know, rapid prototyping. That's like, you could do tweaks on the fly if you need to. Yeah. And we see this in like all of the real aerospace companies, too. They're moving all of their stuff to Incanel or whatever it is that they're 3D printing for some of the more complex parts or just to do rapid iteration on their designs. So when you got into rocketry, were you really like looking to push the boundaries of what amateur rocketry could do? Or did you just, did you just like one day go like, hmm, you know what, you know, kind of like a moment? No, definitely, definitely not. The way that it started is so I mentioned I saw this, I saw this video, it was specifically the F9 DevR test. One of the ones in McGregor goes up to like, you know, 1000 meters, comes back down. And I saw a video of this on Facebook. I was like, uh oh, that yeah, that's the uh oh, I picked the wrong career moment. I kind of figured, like, I wanted a job with these people. And I knew that, like, I couldn't show up with a music degree and ask for a job. Like, I wouldn't be taken seriously and rightfully so. So I had to demonstrate it in some other way, or I had to go back to engineering school. And that second option is really expensive, takes a long time. And it was a literal shower idea where I thought maybe, like, I knew that Arduino existed, that all of this like, open source coding existed. I knew that you could get into 3D printing and like, print a bunch of parts. There were lots of different rocket engines and rocket parts available. And I figured, if I worked hard enough, I could probably like, try to launch and land a Falcon 9 replica. And that would be enough where I could like, tweet it. I didn't really think of the logistics here. But like, I could like, tweet it to SpaceX or something and see if they would say, hey, do you want an interview? So that's how it got started. It's mostly I just, I just wanted a job in the aerospace industry. And it's something much different now. It's, I just like, along the way I've realized, I just find this stuff so fulfilling. And I love sharing what I've learned online, even when it doesn't work, like you end up getting a lot of good feedback and becoming a better engineer from it. But that's what I do. Yeah. Yeah. That's so cool. We actually have a question from the chat. It's from Gregorius Soda-Harmel from YouTube. And they ask, what is the limit on guidance before it became illegal? Man, that's a, that's a good question. There's sort of the joke in the amateur rocketry community that, you know, you really can't put guidance on it because once you put guidance on a rocket, it becomes a missile. And the United States government isn't a big fan of people who aren't the United States government getting missiles. Yeah. I honestly, I don't know why. Because it's like, you deal with like legalities, but I love talking about this. So they're basically, there are like three regulations that you want to pay attention to in rocketry. The first one is FAA Part 101, which deals with model rockets and that different, there are different classifications of vehicles. And none of it mentions active guidance or active control. The second one is the National Association of Model Rocketry as a safety code. Again, there's no mention of active guidance or control. And the third one is another organization, Tripoli, and they don't mention active guidance or control anyway. So there aren't actually, I have to be careful about this. There aren't actually, like the part that you get, because you can get in trouble for this stuff, but the way that you get in trouble is by, usually by exporting it or sharing enough of your information. And so actually you see a lot of university teams with really high powered vehicles steering away from this stuff. And usually for good reason, because export controls regulations, this is like ITAR or the USML, these things deal with the sharing of information as well as the sharing of hardware or software. So what's USML? USML is basically the same as ITAR. That's the United States Munitions List. Okay. If you want to read it, it's, it's like, I don't know, several hundred pages of just really confusing words. But yeah, so it is, it's generally, and then the other thing is there is some gray area in this too. But if, I think generally if you're doing it with good intent, and if you're not strapping any type of, oh, oh, I didn't differentiate guidance, by the way. So my rockets have stability and not guidance. And the difference between the two is stability just tries to keep the rocket upright. It's doing the exact same job as a fins on, as a set of fins on model rockets would, right? So you're just trying to make sure it stays straight up in the air. Right. And guidance would be maneuvering in reference to some point in the real world. So like you're trying to, I mean, you shouldn't do this, but like you're trying to hit a point or you're trying to land on a point, you know, like if you're landing a model rocket, but mine just have stability. So they try to maintain upright, maintain stability. Oh, okay. Yeah. Got it. Okay. So stability is a lot more safe, legality wise than guidances. And I think things get a little bit more tricky there. Yeah, because then it's on the lines of possibly being more like a missile if it actually has guidance. Right. That's when it can direct, like you were saying. Yeah, I think there may be like, I think there's some, there's some amount of scale that gets into this too. If you build something that's guided that weighs, I don't know, like a half a kilogram, it's probably not going to be an issue. If you're building at like something that's like 20 kilograms, you're going to probably get some calls about that. Got it. Yeah, just a little bit. Yeah. Because yeah, 20 kilograms moving really fast is quite energetic. Yeah. Yeah. It's tough, though. There's, there is some gray area in it. I just, I generally speaking, though, there's actually a lot of information about this on the BPS.space website and the about section. I have lots of, there's resources for like the legality around this stuff. But yeah, you generally want to stick to stability instead of guidance. Gotcha. Wow. So what were those first, like, what was, what were you doing at first with your rockets to develop the stability with them? Like the first test flights? Yeah. What was that like? Like, because you're, I mean, you're putting all this together and you're all self-taught about that. So what, like, what's happening during this early timeframe with your flights? Yeah. So the schedule, the schedule for most of this stuff is like, you wake up, you go to Starbucks for three hours, read rocket propulsion elements by George Sutton. This is like, this is like the the Bible of aerospace engineering. But yeah, so it's just a lot of that, then you go home and I basically built like a rigid schedule of like, making sure I was focusing on the, on all of the different aspects of this. So you have like mechanical engineering, you have electronic, or electrical engineering, that's like your wiring, you have software design, things like that. But these first test flights, the first test flights were like awful. The first one, the first one was like a really obvious error that if you, if you showed it to anyone without any further results, they'd be like, yeah, you're never going to make this work. Like, if you, if you did, if you made an error like that silly, it just won't work at all. And actually, that was like the first 10 flights or so were pretty bad. There was like one that was really lucky to have looked really good on camera. But it was for real, just because of like the angle of the camera. Yeah, I mean, they were all bad. And so you learn a little bit more every time you look at the flight data, you look at actually one of the benefits here. So I mentioned off air, but on air, basically, I was a videographer, as I was learning these things. So especially with shooting weddings, you work a lot on the weekend. And then during the week, you just spend a lot of time at Starbucks reading books. But yeah, because I was a videographer, I had access to all of these nice cameras. There was like the company I worked for had a red camera, and we were able to shoot a lot of high speed footage to, so that I could quickly diagnose after a test flight, what was actually going on on the vehicle in addition to the flight data. So this is again, this is like 3D printing, it's the iterative design. If you can afford to just go through a little bit of frustration, it's a really fast way to like get things moving. Yeah, and was there a certain like kind of regime with your flight testing that you were working within? It changed a few times. The first few, okay, yeah, yeah, it changed a few times because the first series of vehicles were called the scout rocket. They were actually dog themed. The scout rocket, it's like scout's kind of a dog name. The computer's name was Fetch. The launchpad software was Throw. So when you first started, like your first launch attempts, was it all stuff you made or did you go to, wow, you just started from scratch? Because I mean, your company now provides what other people can buy, but you didn't have access to you. Yeah, no, I did not have access to Future Joe. I wish I did. It would have been a lot easier. But yeah, so you go through a lot of like a lot of garbage designs, a lot of silly errors. You end up with a lot of those too. You neglect to check a wire that's stuck in some mechanical connection. Always, yeah. You do some testing on some code and you have a bunch of it commented out and then you show up at the launchpad and you haven't re-uploaded the new version or whatever. So yeah, the first, you asked about the flight objectives or like the parameters that you're working with. So the first few flights were of the scout vehicle, like I mentioned, and the goal was just to launch and land in the same flight all up with no experience doing it, which as you can imagine doesn't really work so well and you end up smashing a lot of rockets that you've put a lot of work into. So after about a year of that, I had spent enough money and enough time where I was like, this is not working. We need to switch to something different. So I built a new rocket called Echo and a lot of these are just aesthetic changes. They use a lot of the same flight computers and components. But the new rocket was like the airframe was much more stable. I basically built it so that if it hit the ground like really hard, if it didn't deploy any parachutes and just free fall right into the ground, it would still be okay to fly in like a day or two. And that helped a lot. That helped like really speed up the time between launches. So Echo was like a new, not like mission objective, but like test profile, I guess. So reusability is key. Reusability is key. It is. I love how much experimentation was done and that you do mention that a lot. And I think actually on your website, there's a line that's my favorite talks about how experimentation is really the way to, you know, start to achieve these things. So I have a really awesome question from the chat, from Jake and from YouTube. And they ask about actually the fact that you have kits. They say, are we going to ever do model rocket competitions in school? And what do you think? What type should we build? Water rocket or solid fuel? And I think that's super important that your kids bring experimentations to people. So what are your thoughts on that? Yeah. I mean, definitely, I think, I think model rocket competitions are awesome. I actually, I've had it in my mind to like start one a couple of times, but it's like a non-trivial amount of work. Yeah. But I think the other thing I mentioned on the website, whether I mentioned it or not, this is just how I feel about it. But like experimentation is the way that I learned best. I don't think everyone does, but just being able to have hands-on tools like a regular model rocket, a water rocket doesn't even matter. Something that you can actually play with or work with to help you gain an understanding of a new concept or of a new thing that you're learning is just crazy helpful. At least for me, I found that the only way I'm able to really learn something, like until I actually interact with it in the physical world, I haven't really understood what's going on. Right. Exactly. So I think competitions like that or just any incentive to get kids to like play with model rockets or play with any engineering thing. Like I did first robotics in high school, massive robotics competition, and it for myself and for all of my friends who were involved, it was just a huge, it's like so important to fostering that like innate desire that a lot of us have to build things or to experiment. Yeah. Well, speaking actually of experiments, really another good question from the chat. I love this one. It's from WKD from YouTube. It says, with the amount of launch experiments you do, which bums you out more? Bad launch or not getting the shot? You know, I think at this point it's a bad launch that disappoints me more, but that was only like a really recent flip because at this point there's just a ton of media that I can pull from to be like, look how well things work, even if they don't some of the time. But yeah, because I have a videography background, I also really want to get the shot. Sometimes I'll do a launch and my shutter speed on my camera will be too low and they're all blurry. They're all blurry or something like that, but at this point I think the engineering is more what disappoints me than the actual, as long as I get the flight data back it's fine. Got it. So what began to happen when you started having success with your rockets actually coming back? It felt really good. It was like a solid year of failure, just like one after the other where each time it was more frustrating and then at some point the rocket went up and it didn't like fishtail everywhere and it didn't flop about. It did actually fail to deploy the parachutes and slam it to the ground, but the up part worked. It's kind of how we watch SpaceX go from not being able to land anything to as soon as they could land it once and get all of that data back on what a successful flight looked like, it just got a lot faster. It just really ramped up the pace and it's the same thing here is as soon as I knew what worked I was able to really focus on the things that were working and what still wasn't working. So everything just accelerated at that point. Yeah, so verification was really critical for moving this forward. Yeah, for sure. And even, you know, it doesn't mean that at that point things were perfect. Like every single part of the rocket has fundamentally changed since that point. We went through like a period of like not launching anything over the summer of 2017 where I was just revamping all of the math behind like the flight software and flight simulation and things like that and that really improved reliability too. But, you know, as soon as you get, if you can get like that one success, if you can make it to that point, usually you can make it a little further. Yeah, so speaking actually of moving forward, some pretty good questions in this chat. So I'm going to specifically about that. They're called Apogesis. That's pretty good. Oh, such a good name. Remind me to yell that out. Apogesis. So they ask, how do you see your development pathway going forward? Better usability, switch from solids to pressure-fed liquids, advanced multi-stage? Yeah. There's so many cool things in directions that this could go. So I think we've got like three major things going on right now. The first is this series of videos that I'm producing. It's sort of educational and it's like, if you were going to start from nothing, if you were going to start from where I was in 2015, here's exactly how you'd go about landing a model rocket. Now, I haven't done it yet, you don't have to follow the series and believe what I say, but I feel like I'm pretty close. And that leads to the second one. So the first major one is producing that video series. The second one is actually landing the rocket. We've come really close. It's like two meters off the ground and it hovers and it just, it's so close. I'm in the middle of a massive software update for the landing stuff. We're going to stick it in 2019 for sure. But you heard it here. Yeah. Yeah. You heard it here. On tomorrow, 12.05. Yeah. Yeah. On February 2nd, 2019. You heard it here. I'll stand by it. So that, and then the third one is the Falcon Heavy model. I built a 148 scale model of the Falcon Heavy. Yes, that was awesome. It's like, look at it. It's so, look at how beautiful it is. It's so true. Exactly what Elon said about it, which is that on the surface, it's like, cool, you strap three rockets together. Except it's like a billion times harder. There's so many, there's so many weird considerations that happen when you put three of these things together. Anyway, those are like the three major projects that are, like I'm working on now. And at some point, the landing is going to sort of wrap up because we'll have done it. I mean, that's hopefully, I suppose it couldn't happen. But yeah. Yeah. There's some bigger projects that are coming up in like later 2019. I don't know how much I want to say about it. Okay. That's her. The rockets are going to get larger. That's so exciting. Really good question from Minnie Stoge. Actually, hi Stoge. And she asks, are you going to start building your models out of carbon fiber, like electron? Yeah. Speaking of future stuff. That's, it's such a cool looking vehicle. Yes, it is. But yeah, so actually, where does small enough scale, at least with these rockets? Most of them are about a meter tall, right? They're not, they're not that large. And so it's actually, you know, as long as you're not hitting the ground that fast, it's better to just build them out of cardboard. That's the lightest material. But like some of those larger projects, actually, I can talk about one of the larger projects. Okay. We're, I'm building a reaction control system for a couple of high power rockets. I'm working with a buddy of mine up in Boston with it. But yeah, that's going to need to be built out of a better material than cardboard. Because that's going to be going pretty high and really fast. Got you. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if you're going high enough to need a reaction control system, holy moly. I kind of want to ask you about the challenge of using solid motors, because I think you're just using only solid motors at this time. And that, you know, you light it and it's lit and it's burning until it runs out of fuel. And there's no change in it. Yes. You do have a mention of you can throttle back a little bit if you do certain things. Yeah. Okay. So we'll, first we'll address like the solid motor thing. Basically, it's a little bit cheating, honestly. If you know your flight profile well enough, like ahead, if you know that you're going to, I don't know, have an apogee between 50 and 60 meters or something, just as an example, you can get really close if you spec the motor that you use to land. Even if, even if you don't, even if you don't get it quite right, like the legs should be able to take a little bit of the impact if it drops. And then if it hops a little bit, hopefully you can just maintain stability long enough that it comes back down to the ground. So it is cheating a little bit because I know exactly how high the rocket is going to go. And is that cheating or is that just really good science? It's just, it's just a lot of simple, it's simplifying a lot of the problems that are with landing. But I think that's kind of the key of engineering, right? Yeah. Know what you need to do and get it right. Yeah, whatever accomplishes the task. If it works and it's stupid, then it's not stupid, right? Yes. But okay, so then the second part is, you mentioned the throttling, the solid motors. That can actually be done. There are some interesting ways that you can do that. You could do one, you could do like a system where you, this is, this is, I refer to it as like cosine throttling because you get cosine losses in your motor. So you have like two of them pointed outward and then you sort of gimbal them outward as you want less and less thrust. That's one way to do it. You could stick something in the exhaust plume that like, you know, takes away some of the thrust. You could, there may actually be an instance of this later this year, but you could perhaps change the size of your chamber. That sounds like the hardest possible thing to do, but we'll see. Yeah, yeah. Because I know a shuttle, with a shuttle solid rocket boosters, they would basically change the surface area that would be burning inside of it. Right. And that would allow the SRBs to actually be able to be throttle-able if you wanted to with that. Yeah. And the reason, you know, one of the direct things, if you know what like a hybrid motor is, a hybrid motor is sort of a bridge between a liquid and a solid motor. They're scary. They're scary. They've got all these problems, but they're like, you could certainly do this with a small liquid motor or a hybrid motor, but you know, there are also, there's like a certain amount of challenges that I'm willing to accept in a certain amount where I'm like, I'm just not going to touch that for a little while. So hybrids and liquids, like you're just not interested in the moment. Well, not right now. Okay. Got you. Yeah. There's, there's bigger projects coming, but not right now. Got you. Which path are you leaning toward? The gimbling out, or are you thinking maybe compressing the... I still think it can just work with one. The motors that I'm using, like in model rocket motors, you generally expect like a 5% total impulse variance. So like, how much, how much total energy is your motor going to give the rocket? And there's usually about a 5% variation. But I've done a bunch of testing on the specific motors I'm using and it's like, I found it to be within like one or two percent. So I think that's enough that if I can get an accurate enough start on the retro burn, I think I can reliably touch down. Again, like we'll see. Who knows. But, and if it doesn't work, I think the right way to do it, I outlined this in one of my videos, but I think the right way to do it might be to, well, the one that I would choose is you have a small set of tiny solid motors on the outside and then you sort of underspec the main landing motor so that you can sort of do, it's almost like, you know how the Soyuz lands or the Blue Origin New Shepard cabinet, you can just push it down. So you do like these little impulse motors on the side that just add or subtract, well not subtract, but like add a little bit of energy. We'll see. I don't know. Okay. I have got a question for you. Actually, as you're speaking, I'm thinking a lot about, okay, what can be like this used for eventually, because it's awesome. You know, it's really fun. But, and then you made these kits and I'm like, what else could it be used for? Well, there's this awesome question from the chat that addresses this. It's from AL13N and they actually ask, if you propulsively land, can you actually put payload on it? So is that a thing you thought of maybe doing as like doing some type of payload and eventually turning this into something you can collaborate with other companies on? Yeah, you could certainly do that. I think that's probably not the path that I'd take with it. I think if you, like the height that most of my rockets end up going to, it's just going to be more cost effective to send it up on a drone. You know, sometimes you get, I mean, not that there are ever, ever people who leave mean comments on YouTube, but sometimes. But sometimes the comments are like, why, you know, why would you spend so much time on this? Like there's no real use for it. And I actually, I have to agree. Like it's not that there's no real use, but like the plan isn't to go super commercial and have a bunch of, you know, big customers or whatever. It's just like, this is a cool project. I like doing this stuff and I like teaching people along the way. So I think, you know, maybe there are some commercial applications for it, but mostly I'm focused on the engineering and like how cool that is. And the educational aspect too is huge. I mean, the fact that I was watching one of the videos on your website and, you know, you're saying as soon as the kits hit the market, and you weren't even going to do kits at first. There's people recommending it. And as soon as it hit the market, like sold out right away. And that's just, that's extraordinary because it's starting to then inspire the future generations to want to go into this. And it also is worth mentioning, like you'll never beat like the simplicity in model rockets of fins. The point, yeah, the point isn't that it's useful really. It's that it's cool. Yes. Yeah. Anyway. Which is, which is a perfect reason to do it. I mean, you know, I've seen people turn things that shouldn't be rockets into rockets because it looks cool. Yeah. So I mean, who doesn't want to see a traffic cone suddenly flying? Yeah, a Tiki bar. I mean, speaking of cool things, like I do want to actually talk a little bit about your music. And then I realized, I was like, that's something I definitely wanted to bring up. And there is also a comment from the chat. Also awesome chat room. It comes from WKD. And they off of YouTube. And they asked, what's the deal with wedding photographers and space enthusiasm? Who knows, man? Like, what is that? I guess it's a thing. I don't know. Maybe a lot of other people out there are wedding photographers and love space travel. But but we're having this, this happened for you. I mean, yeah, like I know three off the bat, like Brady Keniston is a wedding photographer. Really? Tim Dodd was a wedding photographer. Tim Dodd was a wedding photographer. Yeah. What's the deal? What's going on? I believe he's watching too, if you want to say hi. Tim Dodd, the everyday astronaut. Hello. Yeah, I don't know what that is. I like have no answer. I will say that like, I really didn't enjoy being a wedding videographer. A lot of people do. Does anyone? I mean, I'm not going to speak for everyone. The same music. I didn't enjoy it more than any other job I've ever had. Like, I didn't enjoy that so much that when you do a job that you don't like, your mind goes immediately to what you want to be doing. Yeah. And so it was as soon as I started doing wedding videography and I saw the SpaceX stuff, I was like, cool. Like there's a there's like a countdown on me doing this job. Yeah. That's so epic. Do you do anything with music still? Yeah. So I studied at the Berkeley College of Music. I have this really nice education in music. And I kind of use it. I mean mathematics, music theory. Well, yeah, I mean, yeah, to be fair, there's like, I did a lot of acoustics stuff at Berkeley too. And there's like a lot of cool math and like determining the mode of a room or things like that. But I do music kind of like Tim Dodd. I make all the music for the videos that I put out. It's not a ton of stuff, but yeah, it's fun. Music is great. I kind of want to ask you too, as someone like myself who started like in an art background and is now going into engineering and things like that, what was kind of the have you gotten a reaction from the aerospace community on this and kind of like, how's that been? Because I know that when I went into the aerospace community, it was kind of like feeling like an outsider coming in initially. Like I was someone with a different perspective than everybody else coming in and kind of like, I don't want to say being shunned, but not necessarily. It doesn't feel good. Yeah, it doesn't really feel that great to be around initially. Dismissal. So yeah, a little bit of dismissal. I think that's normal. I mean, I felt that for a while. There are still situations. I presented some of my work at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. And I remember, so I mean, they're all brilliant in ways that I just will never understand. They're all just brilliant down there. And so I presented my work and naturally as engineers, they want to know the details. And there's a real limit to my knowledge on this stuff because a lot of it is learned by experimentation, which means I have these weird holes in what I know. So they would ask a question that to them seems really simple and I'd be like, honestly, I don't know. Right. So there's still stuff like that. I think, I don't know, I think everyone feels like an outsider at some point. Do you have any plans to maybe get, you know, part-time work on an engineering degree, maybe having the math and the actual materials knowledge that they're asking about? Would that give you kind of an edge on a little boost for what you're doing? I mean, that would certainly be like the responsible thing to do. And I think it honestly is a good thing to do. I don't have any hard plans for it right now. But I think, especially if the ambition is to work in an actual aerospace job, which right now, it's just a further BPS. But if that's, if my goal switches back to like, I want to work for an aerospace engineering company, I think the responsible thing to do is like to go back and get your degree. There's a, there's like, I think there was a little mini doc that motherboard did just recently. But I mentioned it in this, and I'll mention it again. There are some things that work for self-teaching, like for software engineering, where you can mess things up a bunch of times and just re-upload your code. That's fine, I think. But like, if you're a surgeon, maybe you don't want to do the self-taught engineering. Maybe not. And I think aerospace is somewhere in between there, especially if you're working at the larger scale, the stakes are really high. And you kind of want to really have that good base of knowledge. So for the model rocket scale, it's fine. But at some point, you know, you probably want to get the degree. And when you do these test flights, you kind of have like an audience with you there watching them. Like, do you, do you do them at like little events that they have on the weekends or? I'm not, so I'm not superstitious, except for this one thing. Because as it goes, so. Every single time, every single time, every single time I have brought people to a launch and been like, hey, you want to come see my, like what I do for my job? It goes terribly wrong. It's like one time, one time I brought my parents and my grandfather and like my friends out to this test site and it was sunset and it was gorgeous. And the rocket goes up super straight and then it comes down and it's time to deploy the parachutes and it deploys them in the parachutes work, except that they're not connected to the rocket. Oops, oops. Yeah, indeed. Oh, man, indeed. And I completely smashed rocket one time. Actually, just recently, so my friend nanny is for this little kid. He's like six or seven years old and he loves space, you know, because he's a little kid. Yeah. And so I was like, hey, come see a rocket launch. And that whole week I tried every single day to launch the rocket and every time something would fail with the motor ignition or something. I made a whole video about it. I was watching that before. Yeah, failure and burnout. So great. And it's just like, I don't know what it is. I wish it wouldn't be the case. But honestly, like half the reason I generally just have myself and no one else at the launch site is because it's not a safety thing. It's just like things seem to just go wrong when other people are there. Performance anxiety. Yeah, that's what it is. So no possibility for a live stream is a question we have from the chat from PCS Locked. What if Joe Livestream's next BPS space launch and Tim covers it just as a real rocket launch? The live stream is a different thing. I would be down to have someone else live stream it. Okay. Because the live stream is mostly just I'm focused all on getting the rocket set up and then getting my camera set up. I don't know, maybe like all of these other little tiny things that have to happen at the launch site. And a lot of my energy can't be focused on like, what's the chat doing right now? Right. So if someone else came down on live stream, that would be cool. But I'm probably not going to do it just myself. Yes, you're willing to show it live and not talk about it like three days later like Blue Orange or something. There's a lot of secretive stuff that they do. Yeah. And then it won't be superstitious anymore. So yeah, there we go. You'll break the superstition in my mind. Yeah. Oh, and we actually have a question from Tim Dodd the Everyday Astronaut. So he asks, how do you land with the solids? One motor, two motors? How does the computer calculate when you ignite the next engine? Cool. Yeah. So hi, Tim. What's up? But yeah, the way that I do it, it's sort of like brute force through a lot of simulation. Actually, you hear Elon Musk talk about this sometime called a Monte Carlo simulation stuff. So for calculating when you want to land the rocket motor, I have a flight simulator offline that I just I run a ton of simulations and find like, cool, with this given profile, with the vehicle mass, with these two, it's two motors, you have one motor for a cent, and then it burns out. And they're actually, I think I just, I talk about it a little bit in the Falcon Heavy video, but they're actually stacked on top of each other. And the second motor literally hot stages the first motor out. Nice. When it's time to land. It's like an old school atlas. Yeah. But it's a, yeah, so it's sort of brute force through a lot of simulation, you determine what, where is like the range of altitudes that I should be burning that retro motor. And then it's pretty simple in the flight software. It's nothing like the real Falcon 9 uses this super complex thing called g-fold. But my rockets mostly just look at the apogee, they look at a couple other things like the orientation, if it's going to be safe to burn the motor, things like that. And then they just sort of call it when they see it. Nice. Nice. Yeah. Very cool. This is super cool. So overall, what has sort of like been the biggest takeaway from all of this for you? Like what's the thing that's affected you the most that you would kind of want to throw out there for everyone to take? I think this might seem obvious at this point. So BPS has a, has a decent size falling at this point, but share your work online. Like, even if it's, even if it's not good, especially like you can see, if you go all the way back to like the beginning videos on the BPS YouTube channel, or like, I don't know, it's really hard to go all the way back on Twitter, but whatever. All the way back, like even if, even if stuff isn't working, you should still share what you're working on online. You don't have to share all of it. You don't have like open source it, but if you share it, you'll become a better engineer because of it. I definitely have, like every time something has failed, sometimes it's frustrating when someone's like, well, why don't you just do this? But a lot of the times people just want to help and they just want, and you know, they have different perspectives that will help you. So I guess the takeaway for me is like, make sure, like if you're doing something cool, tell other people about it. Don't, there's a lot of excuses you can make to not share your work online. And I think most of them aren't, aren't really valid. Tell us a little bit about BPS space. What would you like to know? It's mostly, I don't really understand it still. So is it like a resource for people to go to? They could buy, they could buy kits as well from you? This is hard. It's hard to describe because I still don't really know like what to focus on, or rather like what to focus on when I'm talking about it. But it's a couple of different things. I think I'd like to make it more of a resource, which is why I'm doing this like landing monorockets video series. So right now we're in the middle of designing a new computer with all of the, you know, specific things that we want to land the monorocket. And then after that, like I'm just going to bring everyone along as we design all the mechanical parts and things like that. But yeah, so it's a little bit of a resource. We're also a direct to consumer. Like we sell these flight computers for Thrust Factor Control and monorockets. They are out of stock right now. I'm working really hard to fix manufacturing stuff. But yeah, we sell those. And then a lot of the, you know, some of the bigger things are, we release a lot of the files that come out with the landing monorocket series on Patreon. So we're, a lot of the reason that this stuff still exists is through Patreon, which is crazy. It's amazing like the generosity of some people. Yeah. Yeah. And if people would like to get more information about you, Joe, where can they go to? Literally, bps.space. You don't need the www either. Got rid of that. Yeah, bps.space. That's the website. All right. Well, Joe, thank you so much for coming on the show today. Thanks for having me. You're doing some amazing work in an area that has really like not seen much advancement for a very long period of time. Monorocketry has been pretty static in terms of what it can do recently with like Arduino and everything. It's kind of come to a point where you can like do some really cool things, but you're like, you're making it exponentially cooler with being able to land and I'm really looking forward to the big things because I would like to land my big things with that mostly because I always have problems packing my parachutes. So, Joe, thank you so much for coming on the show today. And of course we want to thank you, our viewers and our patrons as well, our escape velocity citizens. These folks give us $10 or more per episode to help us out here at tomorrow. Also, our orbital citizens who give us $5 or more per episode as well. And then, of course, we have our suborbital citizens. You give us $250 or more per episode and we'll give you a little bit of time to find your name here. And of course we also have our ground support citizens as well. You can attempt to find your name there as best you can, very itty bitty font. And I love the fact that that font has to get smaller and smaller as things are going on. And when you support us here at tomorrow, you're able to provide things like these amazing interviews like we got to do with Joe today to talk about BPS space. Also, our new show, which is brand new, which everyone seems to like and we're going to definitely keep doing that as well. And maybe some things in the future as well with that. And of course, we do give you rewards back. You can check us out on Discord at our Discord channel. You can also come on over to community.tmro.tv as well because it's not just financial support that we welcome. If you have any sort of skills that you would like to help us out with, you are more than welcome to bring them to the show. And we will utilize them and we'll put you to work if you want to get put to work. So on next week's show, 12.06, we are going to have Asgardia come on in to talk about the attempt or I guess they sort of are a space nation. Yeah, I know. I think me and Space Mike actually signed up to be a part of that. Oh, and Ben too. So I don't think we've paid our citizenship fees. Oh, you've paid yours? Okay, I haven't paid mine. So I guess it makes a mare or something. Are you like the overlord of Asgardia or the overlord? He said you're the lackey. Okay. All right. So thank you so much for watching tomorrow orbit 12.05 and we will see you next time.