Joe Barnard has spent the last three years pioneering DIY landing technologies for amateur rockets and now the aerospace industry is paying attention.
To call Joe Barnard an “amateur” rocketeer is something of a misnomer.
Joe Barnard / BPS Space
As the founder of Barnard Propulsion Systems (BPS), a small business making flight hardware for other amateur rocketeers, the 25-year-old Nashville resident is working on cracking propulsive landings for model rockets. This is the same principle that allows SpaceX to land the first stage of its Falcon 9 rockets after boosting a payload to orbit, but it has never been demonstrated in hobby rocketry before.
The key to propulsive landings is thrust vectoring, which enables control over the direction of a rocket’s engines during flight to change its trajectory and stabilize the vehicle. Barnard is a pioneer in DIY thrust vectoring, and in the last few months he’s harnessed the technique to test self-landing model-scale rockets. As some of the most recent videos on his YouTube channel demonstrate, there are still a few kinks left to work out, but it’s pretty impressive what he’s managed to accomplish so far.
Although thrust vectoring has been used in the aerospace industry for nearly a century, it was a technology generally considered to be too complex and expensive for amateur use. Barnard wants to change that.
“There have been maybe five independent projects in the last ten years trying to incorporate thrust vectoring in their rockets,” Barnard told me on the phone. “Generally speaking it doesn’t go so well or it never gets to the point of flying. No one else has carried it through to the point where I’m at right now.”
Over the last three years, Barnard has managed to turn his rocketry hobby into a full-time gig. Watching videos of his rockets, which include scale replicas of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and Rocket Lab’s Electron, it’s hard to believe he doesn’t come from a technical background.
Barnard working on a rocket. Image: Joe Barnard/BPS Space
“Aerospace is a really exciting industry and I decided that’s where I wanted to work, but I didn’t feel like I could afford to go back to school,” Barnard said. “I also learn better through teaching myself things so I bought a bunch of textbooks and got to work.”
When he first started out, Barnard was truly working from scratch. He had to teach himself not only the basics of rocketry, a complex mix of physics and chemistry, but also how to assemble hardware and write the software programs to control it. Barnard said the most difficult part was learning how to write the flight control software, which required him to learn programming languages like C++ and Swift.
“The hardest part is getting a flight computer to understand how to point itself in the right direction without wobbling around a bunch,” Barnard said. “This is a control problem that usually only super advanced aerospace engineers are doing to fly things to space. They have tons of computing power and resources, whereas I’m trying to make this happen basically using a glorified Arduino.”
Barnard’s early flight computers were prototyped using off-the-shelf components and Arduino microcontrollers, but these days his flight computers consist of customized printed circuit boards with parts that are optimized for their task. Earlier this year, he launched his second iteration of the BPS avionics system, Signal, which he sells in thrust vectoring kits for $350 each. The combined income from selling these hardware kits and the BPS Patreon allowed Barnard to quit doing videography work and begin working on BPS full-time last spring.
Perusing Barnard’s YouTube channel speaks volumes about how fast his homebrew thrust vectoring technology has progressed. Videos of his first rockets from 2015 are a compendium of failure, featuring more rockets sliding along the ground than flying through the air. Still, these early failures were invaluable learning experiences for Barnard and speak to the difficulty of the problem he is trying to solve.
Featured Image: Joe Barnard / BPS Space
Sebastien Clarke
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