Falcon Heavy Model – Flight 1 [video] | Hacker News Reader

Falcon Heavy Model – Flight 1 [video]

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102 pointsfasteddie3100326 comments

From what I can tell, this guy is working pretty much by himself (or he fails to give credit to others). If true, that's quite impressive.

There's a little more info on his site (with some index finger scrolling fatigue): https://bps.space/falcon-heavy

Here's a video of his landing program! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_hJ48LCXWs

He even resembles Elon Musk! :-)

Can not unseen.

Completely. If they were going to make a biopic on musk, this guy should play him...

That said, great video and impressive work.

What I find interesting about this is that in the RC and drone building and flying community, you have generally two categories of aircraft:

a) Aircraft that are designed to be a faithful scale model of a real thing, with all of the intricate modeling and painting work that goes into it. For example there's a person who built a model of an Antonov 225: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRI2y0cwHd0

You can find flying B-29 models, jet airliner models, etc.

and then

b) Aircraft that are designed for a dedicated purpose and look nothing like anything that exists in the 1:1 scale aviation world, such as the "Believer" foam first-person-video plane: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qf4x5XhHvD4

where (b) includes other clean sheet of paper designs like Zipline's blood bank delivery drone, which has a recovery method not dissimilar to a Boeing/Insitu ScanEagle:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FeSCEalMOL8

https://bps.space/ has some additional details, including the flight computer that does thrust vectoring (on a model rocket!).

This makes me want to build model rockets again..

> This makes me want to build model rockets again..

If you need FOSS app for design & simulate model rockets -- use OpenRocket.[0,1,2]

There are many tutorials on YouTube.[3,4,5,6,7]

[0] http://openrocket.info

[1] https://github.com/openrocket/openrocket

[2] https://sourceforge.net/projects/openrocket

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCU8QRVkdYQ

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pp-mVTBd14

[5] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIUaeJ7GV_WPTp26NIkg4rg

[6] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egHbZUEr_Co

[7] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCeWSz41c1ic4pBmUIiZQsTQ

I really enjoyed the "cinematography" that went into this -- made it extra special. The little boop comment in the middle of a very crucial detachment made me laugh pretty hard. Well done!

Ikarus electric "rocket" - Thrust-vectored flying ducted fan

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMeEh5OUaDs

Someone once told me you're not supposed to make rockets with guidance control (in the US) because they are then missiles. Is that true? Is this guy in the US?

I don’t know, but I definitely built some unguided missiles back in my model rocketry days. Always the most expensive models, too!

Lol the look on my 12 year old face when I realiZed how far a rocket launched horizontal can fly. 10/10 would do again

His flight systems are all attitude control, not guidance to a target. It’s a silly distinction but apparently makes things OK. He’s talked with state dept people a lot to be able to sell his kits internationally.

>> His flight systems are all attitude control, not guidance to a target. It’s a silly distinction but apparently makes things OK.

I'm not sure how thrust vectoring is altitude control... I suppose it's OK to steer then so long as your "target" is the general direction up. I can see value in that.

attitude control, not altitude control. Thrust vectoring controls the attitude of the rocket. As in where the nose is pointing.

Unless the video is greatly slowed down, this launches significantly slower than every model rocket I've ever seen.

That's one of his design goals, most model rockets are unrealistically fast compared to the real thing

The footage is hugely slowed down, hence the deep pitch of the rocket motor sounds (they are usually very 'hissy' at this size), and the slow speed of the sparks coming from the motors. Also if you listen closely when the rocket is descending and deploying parachutes you can hear the greatly-slowed-down sound of a DSLR shutter actuating repeatedly (ka-thunk-beep) as photos are taken of the descent.

To avoid disturbing others in the same room, I watched this at first with sound entirely off. Watching it again with the benefit of sound it's blindingly obvious that this is slowed down significantly... Facepalm time.

It would be interesting if he could add GPS to Signal[1] boards. GPS would obviously provide lat/long, but also altitude.

[1] https://bps.space/signal/

He's measuring altitude with the onboard Barometer. Adding GPS to this board would make it highly problematic from a legal standpoint.

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