Scout E Landing Leg Test Footage (Patreon)

Hi Patrons! I have at least two cool things for you this week. This is one of them.

This video is a ton of high speed footage of landing leg deployment. It's a bit exhaustive, but think of how frustrating it'd be if we got close to landing and one of these legs didn't work, so it's worthwhile to be thorough. :)

Parker Waugh interned at BPS over the summer, and one of his jobs was to design a new(and much better) set of landing legs as we restart the propulsive landing program. And boy did he do that... These things are awesome.

The legs are now made of CF rods, terminated by epoxy-adhered 3d printed parts. They're designed to be sort of the "minimum viable leg". Just two rods in tension, one in compression. The legs deploy the same as the previous design - not tested here, but we'll cut a rubber band that holds them back, when it's time to deploy.

Testing round one was a day or two ago, and was alllllmost there in terms of reliability, but as you'll see in all this high speed footage, we've got issues with getting the strut locked into the leg. It was bouncing around quite a bit, something that isn't easy to see without looking at high speed footage. I fixed this with a small steel rod to hold the strut in once the legs fold out.

Speaking of locking the legs in the out position, one of my favorite parts of this design(and the previous), is that in order to lock these legs out we rely on the elasticity of the leg material. Those thin carbon rods that make up the leg are thin for a reason - they need to bend to allow that leg strut to slot in.

We also designed these with a ton of compression force in mind on that larger carbon strut. The force vector goes just a bit up and into the airframe, which obviously couldn't support a ton of compression on its own, so, these legs mount at the same point as the thrust vector control assembly! There's a hefty TVC mount inside that takes the compression load from the struts. We haven't tested to destruction, but we can likely withstand some pretty hard impacts. Don't tell anyone I said this, but I've seen, and you can be sure there are some beefy reinforcements inside the F9 RP-1 tank for the same reasons.

Speaking of thrust vector control - that's next this week! The new TVC mount which can hold two rocket motors is a work of art, I'm quite proud of it. Really excited to get that integrated and shoot some motor ejection footage.

Until then, thanks as always for the support! Let me know what ya think :)

Joe