I Sent a 2 Stage Rocket to Mach 3 | Feat. Insta360 GO 3

this video is sponsored by insta360. hey so back in December my good friend xyla foxland and I flew a Christmas tree to 300 feet on that flight we strapped a few X3 cameras from insta360 and the shots we ended up with were super cool and unique about a month later several friends and I decided to fly a bunch of rockets at far and I thought to myself what if I took one of those X3 cameras but flew it higher and faster to answer that question I took the X3 bolted it onto the nose cone of a little two inch diameter rocket and flew it as a two-stage vehicle to about 2500 meters passing just over Mach 1 on the way up oh this thing survived like a champ and much like the Christmas tree the insta360 X3 performed beautifully and got some very cool shots inspired by the success of this little two-stage Rockets I wanted to go higher and faster so I purchased two l-1000 Rocket motors with the plan to stack one on top of the other Yeet them up to 30 000 feet Mach two and a half and capture some interesting footage along the way so speaking of footage the X3 is cool and all but to be honest with you I do have some doubts as to whether this would survive as being the nose cone for a Mach 2 and a half rocket luckily my friends at insta360 were interested in working together again on a new project but this time instead of the X3 they're interested in talking more about their new camera the go three the go 3 is their newest in the lineup of their go cameras which are these little stick form factors it's such an interesting shape and it allows you to get a lot of shots that you couldn't get from a traditional action camera the camera is also magnetic too which opens up a whole world of other mounting options including a chest cam this chest cam feature where you wear a little magnet necklace ended up coming in super handy during the launch process and we'll cover that a little bit later one of the wildest Parts about this camera though is something that insta360 calls the action pod this is like a little base station for your camera where you can recharge it view what's on the screen you can even use it as a selfie mode and oh what's that it doesn't just work as a screen when it's connected it works as a screen when it's wireless that's right the action pod is Wireless which means that I can control all of the settings view what I'm shooting and even turn the camera on completely wirelessly so long as these two are in range apart from that though the camera records at 2.7 K has a ton of stabilization features and it allows you to crop in post-production because of how wide the field of view is in addition the camera comes with lots of accessories so you can pretty much mount it anywhere including underwater since it's waterproof and because of the free frame video feature you can reframe clips and change aspect ratios after the app also features an AI Driven Auto editing feature which which makes this a great tool no matter your skill level so anyway with all of that covered let's build a rocket to fly this thing to 30 000 feet thank you I cooked up a design using open Rocket then I settled on a fin shape for each stage and I started getting to work the base of the fins is cut from eighth inch carbon fiber I went with a low height swept shape on the upper stage I used a belt sander to put chamfers on the leading and trailing edges of the fins and I moved pretty fast through this whole build process which from zero to launch took just over two weeks about 16 days the chamfers were pretty quick and dirty and once done I attached these to the upper stage using CA in a 3D printed fin jig now with the fins it's time to do some fillets and give that root Bond more strength I did this using g5000 to Rocket proxy and a few 3D printed fillet tools one benefit of these swept upper stage fins is that because the root length or the length against the rocket is so long we get much more Bond area for our fin more Bond area helps your fins stay on but it also increases the stiffness of the fin which helps fight flutter that's a super annoying phenomenon where the air flowing over your fin hits a resonant frequency and your fins turn to Jello anyway once the fillets are on there good and smooth it's time to prep for a composite layup after sanding the crap out of the surface I tried a new technique for getting the layup cloth cut to size I laid down strips of blue tape trimmed them to the size of the fins removed the tape then got rid of the tape stickiness by spreading the thermacells across it then I used that to trace the outlines in the fiberglass for our layup I used seven and a half ounce and two ounce cloth left over from building the Luminaire fin can and I cut it all out with a pair of electric scissors which do a great job of keeping the edges clean I also used the epoxy leftover from Luminaire and man this stuff was very expired the difference in color after thermal cycling in a garage for two years was intense because of this I did a small test layout first with a heat cure to ensure it still worked and then I began laying up the fins much like Luminaire I used multiple layers of fiberglass which got infused with epoxy before placing them on the fin can to save time I laid up all four sides at once and then I moved a space heater nearby to help speed up the process after the cure there's still this nasty Edge on the side that we need to get rid of and I did that using my belt sander this process is a little bit nerve-wracking and you've got to be careful but the result is quick and it's pretty clean I repeated this identical process right around the same time with the booster fins attached with the 3D printed guide filleted with rocket poxy and a 3D printed tool sanding everywhere fiberglass cut guide got made using blue tape then fiberglass got cut out infused with laminating epoxy and placed onto the fins of the booster after curing the excess was sanded off and boom our two fin sections are done although of course no rocket is really done without paint right so let's get some on this bad boy I started out with a coat of semi-gloss white on both stages and then I moved on to accent colors for the first time ever in my life I used blue tape for its intended purpose and not as a work holding strategy and I masked off the area around the fins and edges then I used black paint over the top once the white paint had dried finally I know that insta360's defining accent color is this intense yellow so I put small accent marks on the edge of the fins on both stages the final result was pretty striking and even though it's annoying to spend the time letting paint dry I personally think it was worth it paint makes the rocket go faster anyway while this paint dries we haven't talked much about how these cameras are going to work on this rocket so let's do that when insta360 hit me up they were specifically interested in getting a product marketing shot the idea was to have two cameras you'd have this the main feature camera and then you'd have another one looking back at this camera to get a shot of this sticking out the side of a rocket now for obvious reasons if you you have a two inch diameter rocket and you stick this camera out the side of it that's going to be a disaster aerodynamically speaking but the thing is that these aerodynamics are really only a problem when the vehicle's traveling fast so what if you only fold out the camera when the vehicle's traveling slowly the idea would be that a few seconds before apogee both cameras would fold out the side of the rocket look back at each other get that product marketing shot as the parachutes come out and it would be a win-win because you could fold them back in to keep the vehicle aerodynamic on the way up I was pretty jazzed about this design it's a little over complicated but that's sort of par for the course for this channel so let's hop into onshape and make it here in onshape I'll start off by creating a rough model of the camera and uh I should address the name the rocket is called ebdb the first stage is EB the second stage is DB uh sometimes rockets need cool names and sometimes you see a funny tweet and you go that should go on a rocket and that's there's no other meaning I just thought it would be funny anyway here's our rough camera model and will create a little bracket on the back to hold the camera in this will get 3D printed and it snaps right into place to hold the camera the go 3 has these Nifty little clamp points on either side and it lets you get a much stronger connection than you could with a magnet since we're 3D printing this though I'll also end up zip tying the camera down just in case finally we'll create this base which hinges the camera mount driven by a Servo at the back the mount will be commanded to fold out near apogee so that both cameras can look at each other right as the parachutes come out at around 30 000 feet I connected the servo to the camera using a little push rod and then I finished the avionics part of the build I tossed an Ava flight computer on both stages and the upper stage also got an easy mini computer sort of piggybacked on Ava as a backup each stage beams out Telemetry at 900 megahertz using an RFD 900 Radio and on the upper stage I cut holes in the side of the vehicle using a Dremel to mount those cameras while doing this I also played around with mounting the go 3 camera in fun places and using it to view the inside of the rocket okay POV you are my parachute and I'm chef you in a rocket [Music] this awesome little camera turns out to be small enough that with a little hot glue and a little bit of luck you can mount it to the side of the drill chuck to get the weirdest drilling shot you've ever seen foreign [Music] you might also notice that on the upper stage avionics the back of the printed part looks a little burnt well if you're new here you might not know it's a time-honored tradition here at BPS to slightly burn the avionics in the days leading up to the launch for this time I miscalculated the distance to the Lipo I drilled into the Lithium Polymer battery and the battery got so happy that it released a ton of smoke anyway the only real damage was to the battery and while I get the rest of the parts mounted here let's talk about Rocket Motors each motor gets set up with a boat tail at the end to reduce drag the upper motor gets an ejection charge plug so that the two flight computers can trigger the shoots and the first stage gets to use its charge as a backup but it needs a mount on the top to tie parachutes into the upper stage motor also serves as the coupler to attach the two stages and the hope is that because it's fairly loose when the first stage finishes its burn the drag on the first stage will be greater than the drag on the second stage and the two vehicles will drag separate the second stage motor also gets two strips of copper wire run down the side which get covered in electrical tape and these will be the ignition leads when it's time for Ava to fire the motor I placed an uplooking and down looking camera on the booster as well as a backup and then I got some final coats of paint over them finally after getting most of the upper stage together we tested the fold out function with the insta360 go 3 cameras after this I added a little insta 360 sticker and I set up the upper stage for a pop test to make sure the shoots wouldn't come out very important context here I used 500 pound Kevlar line to connect things up with parachutes and for this specific test I did not tie the sections together and I'm sure that won't be a plot Point later on fine foreign with the pop test complete albeit a very powerful pop test I used the last few days to run integrated testing you know how I always have problems with GPS on these Rockets I dedicated an entire day to making sure we could avoid these problems and it helped a ton I was able to test rearrange antennas test again improve shielding and then know for certain that when I powered on this rocket it would be happy the GPS would pick up satellites and we would be good to go so that we don't have to make any one of those like oh fly without GPS calls at the launch site I even ran these tests with a fake launch rail too after all of that testing was done though it was time to put some crucial ebdb labels on this thing load the car and drive out to far to get this thing launched as soon as we got the rocket on the rail and powered on I knew something wasn't right all of that happy testing with the GPS that we had seen in my backyard was gone it was just nothing the booster could barely pick up any satellites the sustainer couldn't pick up anything but because this is not my first rodeo with GPS problems I showed up with multiple backups in the nose cone of the second stage I placed a spot GPS tracker which can remain powered on for months it sends its current GPS coordinates over the globalstar satellite communication Network which means you don't need cell towers you don't need ground stations and if everything else on your rocket fails and dies it's a great backup to have spot trackers are actually how we found the mark Rober egg drop vehicle after it fell from like a hundred thousand feet and if that wasn't enough I also placed a com spec tracker in the rocket as well these little trackers send out beeps once a second at around 200 megahertz for a full entire week so that even if you lose your rocket you don't have GPS you don't have you know avionics power you have this little thing that beeps out once a second for an entire week and what you do is you go to the desert with this directional tracker and you just start walking until the signal gets stronger so like we have four ways to find this rocket because of all of these backups we decided it was still safe to launch without GPS and mark my words I am coming back to afar with a spectrum analyzer a bunch of RF Equipment a ton of different avionics setups and I am going to find out what this far anomaly is why is it that everything works perfectly in my backyard and horribly at far I'm gonna do it before the launch though of course we needed to double check that the cameras were rolling and everything was looking good and luckily because of this Nifty little action pod I could do that from the ground with the camera mounted way up in the top of the rocket we could check settings modify things start the recording all from the ground and I still think that's like the coolest thing about this whole setup then finally I hooked up the igniter once again shout out to being hands-free with this chess Cam and we were ready to send it thank you 100 200 400 600 700 800 900 1000 meters twelve hundred fifteen nineteen two thousand two thousand ten seconds and loss uh 3 600 meters all right that's that's all I got one packet okay the first stage Ascent was a little Wiggly but otherwise fine and near the end of the second stage burn it was clear that something went horribly wrong about four kilometers up our first goal here was to find the booster which had separated into two different pieces because of how violent that ejection charge was remember before when I said that I used 500 pound Kevlar line to attach the different sections of the rocket I did use that that's a lot of pounds I also kind of used an amount of black powder the pieces of the booster ended up being about 200 meters apart the fin and airframe section was totally intact and the avionics section got an extremely gentle ride down to the ground via the parachute when we found it it was still hanging out on the ground happily beeping with a full cart of data it's alive hey and it's beeping in the like hey I know I've landed State um I'm glad I put a bulkhead in this is definitely hot staged as for the upper stage things were not looking quite as good but they weren't looking bad they were just kind of looking weird so we had data coming in constantly at 10 Hertz after the launch claiming that the vehicle was stuck at like 3.6 kilometers we know this isn't true because that's just not how physics works so we can deduce that the navigation computer on Ava is probably not feeling so hot but even if the data itself is stale we know that we're still getting packets about 10 times a second which means the avionics Bay is probably intact and powered on so next up we decided to look at those GPS pings from the spot tracker in the nose cone which claimed that the vehicle was chilling just outside of the far boundaries and after a ton of searching we did find the spot tracker we just found it completely and entirely by itself he's alive look you blink nice he blink this tells us more information right we know that the vehicle probably broke apart because this was buried fairly deep in the nose cone and because of that Telemetry we know that the avionics are still alive and within range next up I got out the com spec tracker to see if we could hear the Ping from that little Beacon that was attached to the parachutes and we heard nothing complete radio silence this gives us more information although none of it is particularly fun because this tracker was attached to the parachute we can assume that the parachute met a similar fate as the tracker which is no longer with us so most of the objects of the second stage probably came in without a parachute as we kept hunting we also got a call from my buddy Charlie Garcia who had launched earlier and he was out recovering his rocket what's up Charlie rocking in the desert it's white yellow and black and you know whose it is whoa that's crazy you and me are talking about this for the first time not the second time with cameras rolling that sounds a little bit like my rocket Charlie had found the bulk of the second stage with some signs that the impact on Landing was less than ideal but the avionics aren't part of this so we know the avionics section is still out there somewhere we just don't know where we kept on with the search and at this point we were just forming a line patter and combing through as much area as possible so that we could find pieces we ended up finding the avionic section turned on and Alive all on its own without a nose cone and it had just Fallen without a shoot actually I should be more specific it did not have no nose cone it had part of the nose cone because the nose cone had just completely sheared in half this is further evidence that the vehicle broke apart in a particularly violent manner because we got the avionics back though that does mean that we have lots of data and let me tell you this thing was booking it our open Rocket simulation claimed we were going to reach about Mach 2 and a half but our Motors overperformed just a tad and the 3D printed boat tails on the bottom of each motor really helped reduce drag so we actually got up to 1024 meters per second that is over one kilometer per second Mach 2.98 which is just so close to three but actually the trick here is that Mach 2.98 assumes that we're hitting that speed at sea level where the speed of sound is 343 meters per second but we're not at sea level the rocket hit that speed at four kilometers at which the speed of sound is 325 meters per second which means that if we were going 1024 meters per second divided by 325 the second stage was going Mach 3.1 this data also gives us an idea of what happened here which is that during the second stage burn right as the thrust began to taper off the vehicle began aggressively turning sideways pulling 61 G I'd love to see more data from this flight after that event but that is the last data point we have it seems like whatever happened was so violent that Ava just decided to take a nap in terms of an anomaly investigation here I have two leading theories for what caused the vehicle to break apart the first is an early camera deployment and the second is dynamic instability early camera deployment makes the most sense to me so we have these fold out camera mounts and I doubt that Ava commanded one of them to fold out the design has a little bit of backlash in there and so what I think happened is that when you accelerate really hard with a rocket motor you feel all of these positive G's forcing you down but as soon as that thrust tapers off drag takes over and you feel a bunch of negative G's and that high negative G load coupled with the backlash in that fold-out mount might have poked it into the Airstream just enough and if that thing hits the Airstream at you know Mach 3.1 it's over it will fold out completely there's no way for the servo to resist that that folded out Mount would have shifted the center of pressure Way Forward on the rocket and at that point the vehicle is entirely unstable able it probably folds into like a z and that's how we end up with multiple pieces the other Theory here is straight up Dynamic instability which is a common problem among high performance Rockets as the oblique shock in front of the vehicle changes shape you want to have a large margin of stability to counteract it usually this comes in the form of high fins which poke out a little bit further from the vehicle if I made these fins too small it's possible that the vehicle could have lost ability because of how fast it was going turned to the side and then shredded I see a little less evidence for this Theory as we aren't oscillating before the vehicle turns to the side and I would expect that Dynamic stability problems would happen in a harder part of the burn rather than as the burn tapers off back to the recovery effort though we were entirely missing those go 3 cameras which were attached using the clamp Mount then secured with a zip tie and then safety tied in with Kevlar all of which failed which is just more evidence to show you how violent this event was I mean there's no way that a camera could survive this right no way oh my god oh wait oh my gosh I bet it's usable I'm going to hit the button Against All Odds literally all Oz we found this camera just chilling on its own in the middle of the desert and one more time I want to remind you of what this camera has been through so this little guy went to Mach 3.1 in a rocket fell out the side smacked a fin on the way down and then from four kilometers went into a free fall all the way to the ground smacked the ground and it works perfectly fine you are watching me film on it right now it's in great condition other than the little you know just a little cosmetic damage I worked with insta360 on this video because I like their cameras I think they build some really cool stuff and I promise I did not mean to test it in this way but it's a testament to the build quality of this thing that it could survive all that and still work in perfect condition I really can't think of a stronger product endorsement or at least accidental endorsement than this and the only real damage here is this plastic front cover which is literally designed to come off you unscrew the lens cover you take off this plastic piece and you can swap it out with different types of skins for the camera the footage from this flight wasn't exactly what we were looking for you know we didn't quite get that camera looking at camera shot but it did provide some pretty sweet sights and sounds from its way up and subsequent free fall [Applause] foreign and actually as a bonus we kind of did get that camera looking at camera shot because we were recording with this one at 120 frames per second which means that as it fell out we sort of got a look back at the other camera it's just not exactly what we envisioned with the shot one last thing before we wrap it up here I do need to flex a little bit obviously the front section of that second stage is in pretty tough shape but those fins stayed on we went sideways at Mach 3 and the fins were fine I think this tells us that the rocket wants to fly again and I think we should do ebdb2 and if you want to see that let me know in the comments I want to give a huge thanks to insta360 for sponsoring this video their go 3 camera comes out literally today if you're watching this it's out right now this camera is not designed to survive a free fall from thirteen thousand feet in Mach 3.1 but they are Hardy little cameras and I think it's really cool that I got to try this on this rocket you can learn a lot more about this camera the action pod and what these two can do using the links in the description down below and once again thank you so much to insta360 for sponsoring this video thanks as well to you for watching it we're going to have more two-stage stuff coming up soon as we gear up for this space shot my name is Joe Barnard may your skies be blue and your winds below foreign

Channel: BPS.space

Views: 576,743

Keywords: BPS

Id: V7Q6iEDQOJs

Length: 24min 2sec (1442 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 27 2023