Update! (Patreon)

Hey! It's been a little too long. Good thing I've never been late with an update post before(🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃)

Anyway, let's get up to speed here. Scout has gone through 3 test flights so far this year, all returned (mostly) nominal results. The first test was nearly flawless and can be seen here: https://youtu.be/fk6CHDXd5Kc 

There's a good deal of explanation in the video, but to recap we had a pretty straight flight, stable TVC gains, super clean flight data - everything you could want in a launch! Well, almost everything; the legs didn't quite deploy, see 5:29 in the video for the reason why.

After that first flight, we had two more! Those videos are still in the editing process. The second flight was on an Apogee F10 motor, and was also almost perfect. The only two faults were a mis-calibrated accelerometer which lead the vehicle to pitch over a bit after launch. The other oddity was a slightly aggressive move I made, I loaded some experimental code into the flight software. I'll explain it a bit more in the coming video(2, maybe 3 days from now), but the code aimed to start the TVC system just a little faster after launch and instead it kicked the vehicle pretty hard off the pad. Again, other than those two things, a great flight(and good leg deployment!). Very low quality footage until the YouTube version comes out: https://twitter.com/joebarnard/status/1107818294717923329

The third Scout D1 launch took place just a few days later and is SUPER cool. This flight involved hot staging, the photo above shows the first boost-phase! As a reminder, the last time I launched the Falcon Heavy model in November, the center core had an issue with the dual-motor TVC mount. That resulted in the instability of the vehicle, and I thought we'd need to change the mount material to fix it. Not so! I gave it a little more thought and fixed it by simply shifting the motors a little further out the back of the rocket which helps with heat management. This third Scout D1 flight was tasked with testing the hot staging technique and it was mostly successful. The vehicle ended up moving fast enough near the end of flight that stability was hard to maintain, but it was otherwise a success. Here's some preliminary footage: https://twitter.com/joebarnard/status/1108932529220808704

On the RCS front, things are moving right along - we got the Relay RCS computer built on a livestream a few weeks back and it's been moving through the software development process pretty cleanly. I'm noticing the Bluetooth antenna is pretty weak, so that will need work but all the flight-critical sensors and functions work great. I've also got a good portion of the vehicle laid out and ready for integration testing: https://twitter.com/joebarnard/status/1111288732022435840I'll put together another update video on that in a week or two - lots of videos comin up :) Building Relay: https://youtu.be/P3sfOFgR5Yo

And FINALLY the landing tests are back! We had one pretty recently that returned some fantastic data. Not a full landing, but it's closer than it might look: https://twitter.com/joebarnard/status/1111825466283999236

I've been way behind on video edits, and I feel a little bad about it. I'm still trying to strike a balance between testing, which pushes the program forward, and promotion, which keeps everyone up to date. The beginning of the year was unproductive, and the last month has been the opposite.

Thanks as always for your patience and support. If you'd like to know more, have questions, or just want to chat, leave a comment here or get in touch via joe@bps.space.

Blue skies,

Joey B