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Thank you.
Thank you for the introduction.
I will be talking tonight, as is obvious
about rocket science and if it's hard,
how hard can it be?
And my assistant here, Mr. Sandeep
Schon Khan, he will later speak about
some metrological experiments.
I myself am a physicist, an
astrophysicist, and
the work we do in rocket science and
therefore is a purely
amateur rocketry, as you would call it.
We are not pursuing any financial gains.
We are just doing it because we want to
do it. We want to know what is going
on with this.
OK, so what is rocket science?
It may be something that is really
complicated to understand and to learn.
That's what they all say. Oh, no, it's
not rocket science. It's just a synonym
for saying that's really easy.
So in reality, it's to design, build
and fly rockets, of course.
And that's what we do.
And if you do it more sophisticatedly
with a lot of money, we call it aerospace
engineering.
So why would you do that?
I mean, there's a lot of time and money
and resources. You think?
Yeah, why do it?
Yeah, maybe you're just curious.
Can we do it? Is it possible it
was would it driven the first pioneers?
Because it was totally unknown.
If you could reach space using a rocket
at first, then of course, there's
this main driver behind this rocket
science, which is technology where you
want to achieve something like project
something on somebody else, you know what
I mean?
And for
me, as a scientist, as a physicist, it's
very interesting to see all these
spaceborne instruments giving us data
that we are not achievable from the
ground, especially in the infrared.
And for philosophers, it's just a
treasure. Grofe thinking about the
vastness of space and what it means for
us as human beings.
So, of course, if you can get to space,
why not travel? Why don't not go to
other places in our solar system
like other planets, asteroids or comets?
You all have heard about the land
affiliate that has landed last month
on Chillon, Semenko, six
or seven P, and I can say
this name very well because I've been
working on this project and right
now I'm very proud to say that
this lander that has touched down on
the comet has my my name on it.
So thank you.
So space travel leads
immediately to exploration, so they are
spaces, locations
around the solar system or even beyond
it would like to go to and explore,
that is look at it
in their in situ or bring back stuff
to measure it here.
And of course, if you do this for a long
time, maybe in the future we can do
colonization so we can go there to stay
and to survive on the long run.
So this can be your motivation.
Maybe you have another.
Tell me if you find something else, I
would be interested.
So motivation.
Now, let's come to the free modern
rocket scientists.
There were in ancient times
Chinese rocket scientists.
They're not well known, but they were
there, but they were not very successful.
It's a long story, but today
I will talk about the three rocketeers,
as I call them, which is
the first one is Konstantine Edwarda,
which Cherkovski
who lived from the 1960s to 1935.
And he was a poor guy because in the
age of 10, when he was playing outside in
Russian winter, he got scarlet fever
and it left him almost death.
So all his life was,
yeah, death almost
so became a bibliophile autodidact
because he had to drop out of school with
14 because the teacher couldn't get
through to him. I mean, yelling all the
time at Tupa, it's very difficult for the
teacher also.
So he started to read a lot
by himself and he went to Moscow
in a library where he met philosopher
called Shatalov, and
he taught him a lot of things.
And he read you then
especially these two
little stories called From the Earth to
the Moon and the other one around the
Moon, which is a story about three
men being shot by a cannon
to the moon and going around.
It's the first science fiction story
that talks about lunar voyages,
and it inspired him very fast.
He understood that it wasn't possible
this way anyway.
So he became a mathematics and physics
teacher, even death,
and he was tolerated by his environment,
meaning that he ran around, mumbled
something, as I see no problem.
Let him let him talk.
Nobody understood what he was talking
about.
He did a lot of experiments and wind
tunnel. So he built them by himself
and he developed something that we would
call today a Zeppelin
full metal.
But the Russians didn't understand it.
They didn't get it. The authorities
wouldn't help him.
And he became a philosopher in, uh,
branchless today called Cosmos,
some very interesting branch, if you want
to read it up.
So the second one is Robert
Harrington. Got it.
And he left a little later.
Then Sokolsky unfortunately,
he died very young due to cancer
and he had also very fragile health.
Which leads to voracious reading,
and he was inspired by H.G.
Wells, I'm pretty sure he also read Jules
Verne, but we know from his
diary that he was especially impressed
by Ashley Wells.
He became a physics professor, which
gave him some autonomy and
funding.
But during his lifetime, he was ridiculed
by newspapers, especially by
The New York Times and.
When Apollo 11 landed
on the moon the same day,
they for the first time apologized
in The
New York Times for being so
bad to Mr. Gore that
he invented and flew the first liquid
propellant rockets, the first that
this earth has ever seen.
And believe it or not, since
1930, had a workshop in Roswell, New
Mexico.
Yeah, I can change it.
It's the way it is.
And it was sponsored by Mr. Guggenheim.
And in the end of his life, he
accumulated more than 200 patents
that were important for rocketry.
That's a number anyway.
The third one closer to home.
Mr. Chairman, Julius O.
But he was
also inspired by Verne and
his father. He was a American
Shilluk.
He wanted him to study medicine.
So he went to study medicine.
But then World War One broke out
and he got wounded in 1915 and carpets.
And when you saw all this blood and
everything he saw. No, I cannot I can't
continue medicine. It's not possible.
So I switched to physics and astronomy,
which has much less blood.
And he became a physics and chemistry
teacher and a gymnasium, but
he was very restless and started to think
about rockets
and his ideas that he put forward in
the early 1920s were
violently opposed by so-called scientists
heard what he was thinking about was
totally utopian and not possible.
And he was a total loon
anyway.
He developed the first German liquid
rocket engine just a few years later,
1930 was the first test,
together with his pupil, Wernher von
Braun, that some of you may know.
And interestingly enough, he was a
philosopher and parapsychologist.
Oh, yes.
So now a few
important points in the lives of
these three rocketeers that
we know of and one that we
know very precisely because he kept a
very nice diary.
Is Goddard's epiphany sitting
on a charity on the 19th of October
of 1899, he has just
read H.G. Wells War of the Worlds
and had some chores to do outside.
Instead of doing the chores,
he went on the territory where he
thought about and
he said that it was one of the quiet,
colorful afternoons of sheer beauty,
which we have in October in New England.
And as I look towards the fields of the
east, I imagine how wonderful it would be
to make some device which had even the
possibility of ascending to Mars
and how it would look on a small scale if
sent up from the meadow at my feet.
I was a different boy when I descended
the tree from when I ascended for
existence, at least until very purposive.
So here we have a clear case
where a single moment in life changes
everything for this man.
Then another very important point,
this time for Mr. Sokolsky
was the first publication
called Exploration of Cosmic Spains by
means of reactive devices, also known as
Rockets.
This image you see here is an early
sketch. It's not from the book, had a
refined version there, but it's very
difficult to get the book because it's in
Russian and you don't get it in digital
form easily.
So he said in this book that space travel
is feasible, which was totally
preposterous at the time.
Proposals needed to move in a vacuum.
So had it figured out gunpowder
is not energetic enough for propulsion.
And remember that since the 12th century,
every single rocket that I know
of had been built with gunpowder.
And he said, but there are liquid
sufficiently energetic.
So there is a loophole.
Even if gunpowder is not good enough,
there are the liquids that can do it.
And he also named them, for example,
liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen would
be an ideal propellant combination.
And this is very interesting because
liquid hydrogen had been synthesized
only a few years before in
small quantities and he was thinking
about burning it and tons and tons
of stuff where one kilowatt cost like
a million euros, OK, so it was
way, way ahead of his time.
And as is the case with
such pioneers, nobody understood
what he had written in this treatise.
Well, anyway, 20 years passed
and Mr. Albert
published a book.
First, he tried to
write a dissertation in getting where he
was studying astrophysics, astronomy.
It was called in that day.
And he called it a rocket to planetary
space directed to the Planet One.
And his professor, Mr. Maxwell, said,
well, it seems all quite well, but it has
nothing to do with astronomy.
So, no, I cannot pass this dissertation.
So he went on and published it as a book
and later on got a lot of pieces for
this book. And this book was read
throughout Germany and
spread to other parts of the world.
And in the end, this book made made these
free rocketeers knew each other.
So what did you write in this book?
It is possible believes it can go beyond
the atmosphere is very similar to what
Cherkovski found 20 years earlier.
These devices were reached velocities to
leave Earth's gravity.
Well, again, preposterous
and such devices will be able to
transport humans impossible.
So and this was
the really important prophecy, the
realization of these devices will be
feasible in the next decades.
This is quite well known that we landed
on the moon like forty six years later.
So another very important point
was God's invention of liquid
propulsion. The first flight was on
16th of March of 1926.
And.
He used gasoline and liquid oxygen,
the tank, indeed, was below the
burning chamber, totally atypical
to today's design.
So the burning Chabot's, this little
black thing up there.
And then we have the lava flows of
the lava nozzle here, which was
totally new, which wasn't used before.
It pays out to be a physics professor
sometimes.
And it has a
specific impulse of our 170, which
is almost a double of gunpowder, not
very good compared to modern
engines. But anyway, he only reached
fifty six meters and it lasted two
point five seconds to reach his height.
Well, unfortunately, there was a camera
running, but before the rocket could lift
off, yeah, the
film was empty.
So no movie.
You know that moment, right.
You really get something right and then.
No, sorry, but you didn't press the
button. Uh,
OK. That happened two months ago or two.
So, OK, let's talk about
foundations.
What do we need to make rocketry
to be? A rocket science, of course.
Mathematics. Mathematics is everywhere.
I don't have to tell you.
Linear equations, Eigenberg equations,
differential equations, calculus,
integration, everything else and some
specialized things.
To some mathematics is very
basic. Then of course, physics,
although we don't need very sophisticated
physics as a classical one.
So classical mechanics, classically
gravitational theory.
Of course, if you get close to planets
and moons, maybe you need some extension
of the normal point like theory.
But this is not really complicated
then.
And this is for the pyromaniacs here.
We need thermodynamics because this
is a theory of combustion.
Yeah. So combustion is today very
important, especially for high thrust
engines.
And this is
almost I mean, everybody knows
we have the burning chamber here where
the combustion takes place.
And then there's this bell like bell
shaped nozzle that expands
the gas and by expanding the gas,
transforms the inner energy into kinetic
energy of the gas, thereby propelling
the rocket in the other direction.
Then, of course, aerodynamics, at least,
as long as you stay within the
atmosphere, this is very important
because this is the main force on the
rocket.
Yeah, if you have seen rocket
launchers, there's always this point of
Max. Q Mexico means
that the rocket is at the point where the
most forces is acting on.
This is very dangerous at the point.
And after that it gets down.
So aerodynamics
very important, very complicated to
orbit the mechanics. Once you reach
space, you will have to understand
very, very good where you
are and where you're going.
So orbital mechanics and maneuvering,
otherwise you won't reach the target you
intended. For example, the trajectories
of Voyager one and two,
which was really pure luck to
get so many planets in one shot.
You have to launch it at the right time,
otherwise it's not possible,
then you need a lot of mechanical
engineering. So this is today much easier
than it was like 40 years ago.
We have to do a CAT scan.
We have seen similar machines and less
and everything so much easier and much
easier to reproduce, especially because
our materials today are more,
um. Yeah.
If they say it's aluminum, it's aluminum,
it's not just some crap.
Yeah. So we need a lot of metal working
now, milling, milling, drilling,
whatever.
And this is coming now more
into focus. You will use composite
materials if you need a lightweight
structure that is sturdy enough.
It's more complicated than the cutting
metal, but it's really lightweight.
It pays off.
Then of course, electronics, everything
that will fly on the rocket
will have to be very light
and consume not too much energy.
Otherwise the batteries will be too big.
This is prohibitive.
I we don't not in the Apollo era anymore.
We don't need hundreds of thousands of
watts to run a computer.
And in this, I don't have to tell you, we
need a lot of software today,
in the beginning, the first rockets
were launched without digital computers.
They were launched with analog computers,
so-called Myshkin.
It was the first of them.
And there was not one single line of
code. Remember that they flew
the first rockets with that until
the Apollo program. The Apollo program
was the first one that really used
digital technology.
And very important, once the rocket is
gone and normally they are gone very,
very fast, the only way to get
your data through telemetry.
No other way around.
OK, now let's see
how rocketry works.
The principle of every
rocket is a so-called recoil principle
that states and this is a direct
result from the homogeneity of space
natatorium, the total momentum
of a closed system appears constant for
inertia server all with Newton.
If there are no forces, the total
momentum doesn't change.
So if you look at a rocket at a certain
time and the next
moment it expels
a little bit of mass with a relative
velocity.
You. So this is a velocity minus
you in relation of the center of gravity
of the rest of the system.
So you go from here to there.
Of course, it's a continuous.
But just think about atoms flying away.
So anyway, if you say that this
is conserved, then the total
momentum in this moment has to be equal
to the total momentum in this moment.
And this leads to the simple equation.
I know equations make people
run away
from this one.
And if you look at it very, very closely,
you see it's much easier, this one.
So if you divide it by the time Delta
TB, you get a differential equation.
Can you integrate, yada, yada, yada?
And you get to choke off this formula.
He found that in eighteen hundred
something. So it's not complicated at
all.
Yeah, no,
no. Really
it's it's OK.
Well, this thing that I called Delta V
that stands here, this is the only thing
that you really have to remember, Delta V
is somehow proportional to this expulsion
velocity and some logarithmic
of the ratio of beginning and end
mass. OK, so
this one here is technologically given
by the engine you have.
This is a velocity given by a gas
explosion, for example, is in the order
of between 1000 meters per
second to a maximum of 5000 meters per
second.
If you use electric engines, you
can go much higher.
But with with chemistry, you are bound
to this explosion.
And the second term here,
the light of the rockets gets after the
burn, the higher the total term gets.
But because of the logarithm, the effect
is very small. But anyway, you will try
it.
So what what do we need Delta V for
you needed to get from one place in our
solar system to another because to get
from one orbit to another, you need a
certain Delta V who of you
place Kerbal Space Program.
Oh, OK.
So very good.
Very good. Yeah.
When it sounds to me my
wife doesn't like it anyway.
So to get from the earth to low earth
orbit you need an exorbitant amount
of up to 10 kilometers per second.
That's why it's so complicated to get off
the earth once you are on orbit.
It's relatively cheap to get to other,
let's say, to a geo transfer orbit is
2.5. So only one fourth.
Yeah. And from there to Mars,
it's just adding up this one.
It's not that much. OK, it's still
something, but not that much as going
from the Earth's orbit.
So getting to low earth orbit
is the real challenge.
Once you are there, you have all
the time in the world.
You can use a very, very little engine
that is just very efficient and you get
where you want.
OK, but getting into the Earth orbit,
this is this is the lesson you have to
learn that's complicated,
OK, to get there.
Normally one stage is not enough,
so you use two or several stages
and then just this Delta V just adds up.
And so this is the first stage.
And you start with the Mars M0 and at
the end of the world you have to Mars and
one and then the next stage to start with
and one and the rest is M-2.
And this has to be as large as possible.
So you spend every time a lot of Mars
and that's why ASAT on five rocket
looks very big at the beginning and very
small at the end.
OK, so
now let's talk about our project.
Why would we even do that
so far, our case for the fire?
We want to make testing on suborbital
flights. We kind of got into orbit now.
It's impossible with the resources
we have, but we can test it on suborbital
flights. That means we just fly to,
let's say, 10 kilometers or even only two
kilometers, and then we can test all the
stuff that is needed for a real flight,
like telemetry, avionics,
everything.
And it doesn't change.
It's just a bigger rocket in the end.
Then even if you only go to a few
kilometers of height, you have
almost minutes of zero or microgravity,
so you can do really interesting
experiments without going into space
and.
What we really want to do is cross the
common line, because at that moment the
common line is at 100 kilometers.
It's just a definition.
There's no real line there.
You can go up there and look, there's
nothing anyway.
One day we just thought, OK, when
are we in space? It is 60 kilometers.
No, it's 80, 120.
Let's take a round number.
Let's take 100 kilometers.
And that's the common line.
Normally you say a common line is defined
by there is no
there is no possibility that the plane
can stay up there.
You need a rocket.
So and what is very important to is
meteorological agency to measurements,
and they I want to switch
to my colleague Sean, because he is
to meteorologist.
Yeah, Mike.
Thank you, David.
Ladies and gentlemen.
So while David has already mentioned that
rockets are one of the possible
means to access the interplanetary space,
and you can do some kind of science and
interplanetary space, we can also do some
really interesting science without
going to the interplanetary space up to
and height of maybe eight to 10
kilometers. That is the upper limit of
the troposphere. In fact, you do not even
have to go to 10 kilometers it just to go
to five kilometers.
And you can do real interesting stuff.
Let us take a look what we can do that
does not yet
go.
Here I have quoted a line from a paper
from Wonderly Martins,
and this paper was published in the
Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics
Journal, which is an open book, Open
Access Journal from the European
Geological Union.
And there he writes that unfortunately,
all the matters that we have today,
including today's radio Sondos, including
to the satellites and barometer's,
they are not enough to study,
for example, a cloud, particularly,
he emphasizes that the thermodynamics
that is happening in the top part of the
cloud, which is illuminated by the solar
radiation, is entirely different.
And what is happening in the bottom side
or the scythed parts of the cloud,
which is not eliminated, and thereby
you have entirely different and dynamic
phases, entirely different dynamics
of water vapor and insetting and again,
again, vaporizing.
And this can have
really deciding effects
on the climate system of this planet.
Why this is important for us, because
if any one of you have read the report of
IPCC, the last one and the one before
that, you will see that the
security that we have on our knowledge
about erodable systems, more specifically
on clouds, is really, really low.
If you want to quantification, then the
amount of error is in the order of
300 percent and therefore
investigating all systems or more
specifically, investigating clouds
and the indirect effects.
How they influence the leader of the
planet is really important in order to
predict what the planet is going to look
like in the next year or in the next
decade and how the climate system is
going to be affected by that, why
rockets make a very interesting
and a very perfect way of investigating
that will be cleared from
this picture.
This is an investigation done
by NASA, as this is called Greece as the
country of Greece. But the stands for
ground to Rocket Electricals,
something called lation experiment.
And what you can see here is that
a rocket is delivering a sun directly
inside an aurora.
So the important part
here is that a rocket can do a really
precise on delivery, really precise
instrument delivery.
And this is why this is real interesting.
Then we can deliver a device on
the top of the cloud or even on the
bottom of the cloud. And then we can use
these two devices to investigate
what has not been investigated yet.
In order to do that, we do not need
really big rockets.
First, let us take a look at this rocket.
This is a solid rocket
called Javelin. This was developed to
study the upper atmosphere, more
specifically the sphere and
the ionization properties of Nanosphere
so that the Americans could develop
FM radio communication technologies more
efficiently. But we will not need that
kind of rockets. We'll need much smaller,
much low flying rockets.
And Dr. Madlener will tell you more about
such kind of rockets and their flight
properties.
Thank you.
So as you have seen, Sean
is very passionate about clouds,
and so this is
a typical concert.
This is not our cancer.
This is just one concert is very small
satellites really as big as a can,
nothing more.
And you can today with modern
microphones, you could put something in
it that can measure whatever you like.
Yeah. I mean, there are so many sensors
today.
Just go on the Internet, search for
Ardino or whatever, and you get for
50 bucks. You get so much that you can.
Yeah.
Make like 10 concerts
anyway. So what, what, what do you want
to do and how do we do it?
Our philosophy here is
to keep it simple, stupid, with
or without common.
So we use solid rocket engines mainly.
We are also working on hybrids, but they
are a little bit more complex.
So solid rocket engines is what we have
used the last nine
years. And they are based
on something we call Candy.
Actually, you can really eat the
ingredients. I wouldn't recommend to eat
it in block, but
it's sugar.
It's salt that you normally
put in me so it doesn't get bad,
a little bit of charcoal, which is not
good for the taste and
iron oxide, which is
more healthy.
Anyway, we use always common
material. So we use aluminum, we use
steel, we use multiplex
wood, we use PVC,
whatever.
You don't need something exotic like
magnesium, aluminum, whatever.
Yeah, it's not necessary.
Sometimes we use the glass fiber.
Carbon fiber is nice, but it's
very difficult to handle.
It's bad for your lungs and
it's very expensive.
So we don't do that.
We use standard manufacturing techniques
or milling, drilling, the less
churning these are allowed
and we always use a low budget, so
none of our rockets is more expensive,
let's say two kilo euro.
Yeah, this is our budget for one rocket.
Of course, a lot of money goes into all
this, running around, going to Denmark
or wherever.
But the rocket itself, it's very cheap.
And to keep the budget even lower,
we built them to be reusable.
So parachutes.
OK, so what have
you done in the last years?
This is from 2005, it's called LAGOONA
one was a nice little three meters
long, 16 centimeters diameter like
this, and it could fly to almost
one kilometer.
And this is a flight in
two thousand, six or seven.
This is pure candy, as you can see from
the white smoke.
This is soda soda powder,
essentially, and
you don't see a flame, the flames are
very small because it doesn't burn very
hot and has some specific impulse around
140, which is not very good, but
it's extremely cheap.
Like one kilo costs us like two euros.
And in this on this rocket
is just to kill us,
to building rock, to build rockets and to
fly them. That's not the expensive part.
Expensive parties to get there
and to get the permission to do it.
It's more expensive today, at least.
So this is Acuña two, which was built
a year later and
was trimmed to be very fast.
It has a diameter of only 11 centimeters
here, a slightly larger
motor, and it's getting up to about
two and a half kilometers with the
median moto.
The big motor was never used a big motor.
So the aft part is the motor.
So the medium motor is like from here to
here, that's all. And the big motor,
the Enmore that it would never use would
go up to here.
Yeah.
And we did never use it because it hadn't
the permission to go up to six, seven
kilometers. That's the only problem we
had at the time.
Anyway, we flew it a few times.
This is also, again, normal, Candy, as
you can see from the white smoke
then we built in 2008.
They are three, which is
not very much larger, but very much
thicker, as you can see, is 20
centimeters diameter.
So you can pack a lot of stuff inside it.
And because we we understood
that with Acuña, too, which was very
fast, was very difficult to put anything
inside. But at the time we had no RVN.
No, it's not a problem anymore.
Anyway, in flight it's just slightly
different because this year
is what we call suka
super kendi, which is a mixture.
Yeah, it's not my invention, it's
invention of doctor, which has a patent
on it. He's a member of our club
and the patent is just too so
protected. So no one can can take it away
so everybody can use it.
It's essentially the candy
with a lot of aluminum powder
like 200 micron powder and it goes really
as high as like one hundred seventy
seconds specific in.
So it's a lot of more power behind
it.
OK, so in 2008, 2009
we thought about, OK, now we build three
rockets, but we want to go higher
like 10 kilometers or so.
And we had contact with the
Danish club called the Danish Space
Challenge that operate
from this little
little town close to our house.
And then we
had to motor.
We will see it later in action
here. This section here, this is
the motor this upper section
was a recovery section here, upwards of
avionics bay.
We made it short after that.
This year is the ramp that
we built for Poland.
But then Poland was so dry that we
couldn't go. That was in 2011.
They called us like one week before we
were ready. We wanted to go to Poland
and they said, no, you can come.
And why not? It hasn't rained in like
four weeks and your rocket will ignite
our wood. So sorry.
Sorry, guys, next year maybe.
Anyway,
so let's talk about pot production.
I have told you that we use normal
manufacturing methods.
So this is left
and after a while it looks like this.
So this is for the moto, the
upper compartment, the Daptone,
and these are the parts, the couplers
and
for the avionics bay, this operation
coupler.
So these are the normal couplers for the
for the tubes. And this here is for the
motor.
They were manufactured in 2010
and then we had to made holes in it.
I mean, you take a drill, you make holes
in it. Right. But you have to be very
precise. That's not very easy.
So what you see here is a stepping motor,
which you can give impulses.
So it turns a certain angle.
Otherwise it will be imprecise.
You cannot do it by hand.
So impossible
again, milling, milling, milling.
It takes a lot of time.
So to thing like this, it takes like
four or five hours.
This is the nozzle combined with the
enclosure. So you see
the graphite part. Graphite is really
very, very nice to to handle.
Of course it's brittle, but it's
self smearing. So you don't have to use
any lubricant during the procedures.
And is this not from
from the other
side? So you can see here the throat of
the nozzle where the hot gases go through
and don't touch this after test.
It's really hot.
So let's talk about our last
campaign in 2014, our
colleagues from D.C.,
uh, had the courtesy
to bring us over material that we left
there, the akuna
for parts, because we had to come from
Cologne and Berlin and Munich
and so on and go all the way up to
Denmark.
So taking the whole rocket every time up
and down
futa. So we left the rocket in two
thousand thirteen there
and they told us, no problem, we will
bring it by.
And that's what they brought us on Monday
and we were scheduled to launch on
Saturday. OK, so we were like,
oops, what do we do now?
But the Danish Space Challenge is up
for a challenge.
So Danish soldiering challenge,
they really within within a few
hours they could repair
it by soldiering.
This is doable. This is not very easy.
It's very brittle material.
They tolerate using
using nitrogen gas
together. Again, of course,
we were a little bit astonished
that tool could break so easily.
So we removed all the paintings
and then used fiberglass
to reinforce it again.
So we were there for one week before the
launch. We came there on on
a Sunday.
On Monday, we were brought all the
stuff from the AC module,
all the fin, and then we
started to integrate.
So we integrate for a whole week.
This rocket, this was one step
misses the avionics bay, the upper
avionics bay.
We can see here on the upper
this antenna is just for testing.
A real antenna would be more on top.
This is an RFM to have a module
from Holper if half of what
is seventy centimeters, very powerful
here. Below there are sensors, gyroscopes
and accelerometers and you below a data
processing unit, simple microcontroller
x3 to a if somebody wants
to know.
So is this another view from
upwards. So you can see again here
the power module yariv power module.
This is just a voltage.
This was the antenna for the test.
So this is during integration, so these
are just two simple ripples.
Yeah, it's very simple.
Just put them on top and what you can see
here.
Is some cables running down
to an ADC down at the data
processing unit, because
we try to launch this rocket like three
times and every time something
else happened, the first time
the batteries ran out on us.
So we had it on the ramp.
Everything was ready and then no
telemetric came. We said what what
happened?
And it was just the battery
died on us.
It was the first time entitlement, the
north part of Denmark, the
second time in
the Danes switched
the place where they wanted to launch to
Namenda Gap, which is in the southern
part of Denmark.
And there is very, very fine
white fine sand.
And indeed, there is a location
very close to the minecart, which is
called Villazon, which is White Sands.
If anybody knows what that is,
so we long we try to launch from
White Sands, but then they got with a
truck on this white sand and it just sank
into the sand and they had to call a
crane to get it out again.
So no launch at this day
anyway. So this is after integration
and you can see the look in the eyes.
Finally, it's done.
Yeah, it was like several hours.
This is on the beach again, a very fine
sand here on the left.
Our meteorologist here on the right, the
other ones and
on the beach, you really have to work
inside a tent because you cannot you
cannot work in the wind and in the sand.
Everything gets full of sand.
I mean, the sand is really strange.
You get full of it like everything is
full of it. And then you go off to the
beach, make like this, and it's gone
so fine that it goes into everything,
especially into your mechanical parts.
And lubrication, this is the antenna.
This is circularly polarized
antenna. Very nice for 70 centimeters.
We are two of them.
This is one round station.
So we receive telemetry over this
antenna, goes directly to laptop and you
can see the stream
in realtime.
So these are the three parts.
Again, the typical avionics
parts with telemetry
and the recovery part,
which is a CO2 cartridge which is
ejected at at the highest point or should
have been ejected at the highest point.
This is the motor I
come to this this is the motor
with the 18 kilograms of suka giving
about one point two tons
of thrust for about three seconds,
which gives the rocket an acceleration at
Bernauer of about 30 G.
So it's fast.
If you count to three, it's gone.
I mean, literally gone.
And this is the recovery section with
the parachutes and of course,
as we are overseeing a Buey
or better said, there were two Bewes but
only one worked anyway.
This is a launch, so it's
very impressive. And I want to show you
on video.
Just have to start it up.
First of all.
Oh, no, first first I show you the motor,
this was a test performed in 2009,
why are we just thinking about Yagoona
for so there was a test that didn't work
out in 2008.
So this is a set up, very simple, if
you look at it, you can find everything
and your normal hardware store except
maybe the graphite nozzle, it's very
difficult to get. But anyway,
so this is Dr. Eckel.
If you look closely, he is missing one
finger on his right hand.
And yeah,
he says he will never again touch
chlorides. Never.
Yeah, he works for this.
He lives for this.
So he he's a chemistry
chemist by by profession and he
worked for as director of the Jimmy
and Son. So he knows what he does.
Yeah.
But even professionals can get sometimes.
Yeah. Well mutilated.
And he's also a slightly deaf on one
ear.
So
that's why I always say please stop doing
solid rockets,
but nobody can stop this man.
So we are in a field.
I think it's somewhere in Bavaria.
I don't remember exactly.
Can we get sound on this?
Yeah. Put a little louder.
Right.
The danger here.
Yeah, but I
thought I'd
voted for.
This sukkah is very slow and
we have a reason why it's so slow.
We tested it at Bam, it has this bomb
certification, which is in Germany, we
say without bam, no boom.
OK, this is very important.
You are not allowed to use such
pyrotechnics without the proper
registration, everything.
So Dr. Erkel has the
certificate to manufacture that kind of
stuff.
Of course, as I said, he had problems
with chlorides, so he switched to
nitrates and nitrates are also very
volatile.
So they tested this motor and they found
out that the sugar is extremely
sturdy.
That is, you can go at it with a hammer,
you take it to a piece of
suka, you take a hammer and you can.
Really, it don't try this with
any combustible rocket fuel.
Yeah, but this one is really, really
very slow. That's why it takes so long
until it gets started.
You really need the motor to build
up the pressure until it goes and
when it goes, tell you.
OK, so first of
all, I will show you the.
It's.
This is a test of the ejection system,
of the recovery system,
so it will put out the
parachute.
So this is in real time, it will be
slightly fast, so we'll stop
it when it's out.
So that was it.
Yeah. So this happens in midair in
the highest point, just ejects
through CO2 and what we see here.
Well, this is avionics and the here
connected to a shock band and a Carabine.
This is a um,
a drug shoot from a drone
called Seattle 289, which is very cheap,
like Tanura, but it's
of the best materials from it.
And here down here, you have to be
the one that got destroyed.
But one view, another one is
in the lower section.
So there is one checkpoint that goes down
to the lower section and at the proper
time or height, to be more precise,
a 400 meters a second pyro.
Resolves a junction down there
so the main chute can get
out the second.
So this can be shown also in slow
motion. So you can really appreciate
what's happening there.
Please look for the CO2
snow.
I think I have to it this is really
slow.
Takes a lot of time.
I think this is a catastrophic one.
I don't know, I don't remember.
Just to the end, no.
OK, so this is what happens
in slow motion.
We made a lot of tests and this was one
very, very spectacular during daytime,
we did some test you nighttime.
So this is the launch itself,
this is slow motion.
I tell you, this is slow motion, this is
like half the speed of the real rocket.
Bye bye.
And reality is like, where did
it go?
Well, it was very funny this day because
we had we had at the beginning, we had
blue skies, really nice weather.
And then the clouds came.
And our Danish friends from then
especially, they had also a rocket, a
little smaller one too small, but
not that fast.
And it went into the cloud.
And in the cloud something happened like
boom.
And then on the same trajectory, the
rocket fell down.
So as if the cloud would have
landed up or something.
And then this one got up and we got nice
telemetry, but
it went down and we never found it again
at that day, at that day.
So we're a little sad.
But we had the telemetry, so we were glad
and sat at the same moment glad because
finally we could launch the rocket and
said because we couldn't take it home.
But two days ago, later when
we were there on
Sunday thinking about nothing, email
came in and said, look what the
cat dragged in.
And there are rocket was again,
it had survived with one view
and it wasn't in Danish newspapers.
Everything Rocket found at
whatever site.
And we don't know where it comes from.
Yeah.
But but the chairman of
Deacy, he's a journalist.
No problem is press release was flawless,
flawless anyway.
So that's what we have been
doing now.
We will try to
to revisit the Yagoona four, which is now
in Denmark using a dart to
go even higher.
This one reached six point five
kilometers.
I could show you all the telemetry, but
it's not really very interesting and
takes a lot of time. But if somebody is
interested, please ask me
and this will be our next rocket.
OK, there are links, but this is like
the same length as like 4.5
meters, but like 30
centimeters diameter.
So 20 to 30 centimeters.
It's called Yagoona five.
And we have already a mock up, not a fly
in version in the sense that it will go
like 50 kilometers high, but a mock
up that will go up to about two
kilometers just to test everything,
aerodynamics and so on.
OK, so that's for today.
Please, if you have questions.
David and John, thank you very much for
this very, very impressive speech.
So now we have questions, answers.
We have 10 minutes.
So please line up behind the microphones.
We have three over here and three over
here.
Why are you lining up?
So any questions from the IOC?
Yes.
Um, one question was, are
there any restrictions or
on height or the
size of a rocket that you can launch
in your backyard or anything?
Or are you restricted and it
is forbidden?
Are there any restrictions?
Well,
how can I put this?
We are in Germany.
Actually, we have been trying to
launch rockets from a military
ground since 2006,
which is now let me see well, wait
eight years and they
granted it is on 8th of December
of this year to launch two rockets.
So we launch rockets and bomb, although
you may have been reading it otherwise.
Google it. Baumholder fire.
You will find it.
And yes, there are a lot of restrictions.
We had 31 restrictions to launch in a
military place.
So think about launching it in your
backyard.
Of course, if you go to Denmark,
it's a totally different matter.
They just ask you, is this a rocket?
Yeah, OK.
And don't leave the space, OK?
So it's much, much, much easier.
But of course, the bigger
the rockets get, I mean, the rockets, he
just one, two and three.
And they're really model rockets.
I mean they look like big rockets, but
they only fly up to 2.5 kilometers.
This is still a model rocket.
Yeah. Lagoona, for something totally
different. I remember this Danish woman
standing there first, having
watched her own rocket and then the
second one.
And she said without thinking, wow,
that's a real rocket.
That made me very happy.
Anyway, I did ask
this question fully answered.
Yeah, OK, thank you, David.
Gentleman number two, please.
OK, first, you
asked in the beginning for for
further reasons to go to space.
And I came up as one, actually,
because you maneater earlier
or Rahzel Hopley later.
But my real question is
some technical details about the rocket.
You mentioned it right now.
It's rather a model rocket
and it doesn't really go to space
yet.
And I'm wondering, you know,
what the next steps are, especially
because I guess
you will not get into space with sugar
alone.
Well, we don't want
to, but there are people there's a
project called Sugar Shot to space
as to as they really
try it. But they have a problem because,
Candy, this is sugar
propellant has one drawback.
It's edible, but has one whaleback.
Uh, it's brittle.
So if you make large grains, let
about 12 centimeters diameter starts
the problem, start that when you start
up the engine and the pressure peak
comes up, then some of the grains
may break.
And if a grain break, that means that the
area, the burning area will
very, very fast, which will produce
a pressure spike, which will make
a faster reaction, which will produce
more pressure. Will you get it?
OK, the next question is, you
mentioned the price
of euros and I wondered
what the maximum weight is
you can transport up to.
But what are
good enough for you mentioned
will go 10 kilometers high.
What's the payload you can transport out?
Yeah, we we are we are aiming for.
The thing is, the rocket is really,
really heavy.
Now we make it that heavy because we
cannot go that high.
So last time we had 30000 feet, which
is approximately nine point one
kilometers of ceiling.
So we didn't want to
make a very
agile rocket, very, very
high going rocket.
And so we were happy that it stayed below
seven kilometers as you have to have some
margin. Otherwise they don't believe you
that you really know.
Anyway, we could transport like
five kilos or so at the moment.
Of course, there's not enough space
unless you put it in steel or something.
So something like two kg is
more realistic.
Yeah, that's totally enough for a lot
of avionics.
OK, and my last question is about
testing.
I mean, it's quite difficult to test
the software which goes there
if it is
expected to experience in excess
of, what, 40 G's of
acceleration.
I guess you do not test this in the lab
before.
Well, yes, you can test it.
It has more than 40 years when it hits
the ground.
Try it, OK, but it's not
OK.
Probably.
OK, David. Thank you, gentlemen.
Number one, please.
Yes.
And couple space program alone launch.
You need some kind of control for the
rocket so it doesn't veer off.
Did I miss that part or can you explain
how your control, which is still
on the market?
Uh, yeah.
Control and control.
Well, we would like to control it.
The problem is that.
As I said, keep it simple, stupid.
So at the moment, no control,
of course, the rocket is stable and
so it doesn't go anywhere.
We don't want to, but it's passively
controlled on this trajectory.
So you once put the ramp
up and you aim for the direction
and that's it. And because they
accelerate so fast, they are immediately
stable.
And the the
momentum court
is like half a meter.
So there is absolutely no motion.
It's like a straight arrow.
And of course, we would like to control
it. But what's the point at the moment?
At the moment, there's no point because
we have we have solid rocket motor
separation in three seconds.
So after that, what do you want to
control?
No more. No motor burning anymore.
It's another thing if you have hybrids
which accelerate with like only 2G
or even lower, then your rocket
is totally unstable and you need control
and there's no way around it.
So what we will do is take this
very nice omoto, propel
it to 30 G's, up to
one point seven max, and then put
a little dot on top with
a little hybrid motor.
So it's stable.
Yeah. So we can go up to 10 to 20
kilometers without new technology or
almost no New Hampshire.
Thank you.
Number two, please, um,
you maintain that there are laws
in Germany. Uh, you said without
them, no boom or something.
If you build hybrid motors,
are there restrictions to or
how does it work in Germany?
Down restrictions,
yes.
Anything from Iasi?
OK, number two, please.
I've seen people using
balloons to do measurements
that sounds a lot cheaper and
easier.
It's a lot less spectacular.
But why aren't you using them?
That's the point.
At some point, it's less spectacular.
No one. No one.
And the
thing is, of course, balloons are very
easy to get like to 30 to 40 kilometers
of height. That's true.
And if you really want to just go up to
this height, use balloons is OK.
The thing is, don't expect it to come
back, number one, or it's really
difficult to get it back.
OK, rockets are sometimes also difficult
to locate. I know
we have lost some of them on on,
but we always found them in the end, like
a few weeks later or so.
So balloons are a nice thing and we
wanted to do it, but we just hadn't had
the time. It's all you can use balloons.
No problem at all.
But don't expect to go to 100 kilometers
of possible in the long run.
Yeah, but balloons are a nice thing
unless you want to launch rockets from
balloons, which I don't recommend.
Number one, please.
Once you get the sensors up to the
height that you want, you're only going
to get if you don't have anything to keep
them there, one or two seconds at most
of readings.
Can you comment on it?
Are you really you need to have a sensor
that is far enough with a separate of,
let's say, 10 years or so.
What happened is two or three seconds,
like 20 to 30 datapoints.
What do you need more?
I mean, how long do you want to stay up
there, take a balloon if you want to stay
up there longer?
It's a valid point.
The thing is, the thing is using a
rocket, you get to profile an almost
instantaneous profile of all the
observers from the ground
to the top fast with
a balloon, you take several minutes
to half an hour to get through all of
this and you'll get it twice up
and down.
Yes, sure.
Well, there's one more thing, the
delivery of the device is very, very
precise.
So if you have a particular Cloudland,
for example, you want to investigate it
and you will not use a balloon because
the crosswinds may drive the balloon
somewhere else, somewhere far away from
your cloud or somewhere far away from
your Hollywood. So you lose a rocket
which will directly deliver your device
where I want it to be.
Yeah, OK, thank
you. Number two, please.
Yes. If you use GPS with
your rockets, does juridically
maintain a lock on the signal?
Oh, that's a
real problem with Yagoona.
I didn't tell you.
The thing is that the Yagoona for
was a full metal jacket, so no GPS
receiving and it
went up to six point five kilometers.
And we anticipate it to go up to like
seven point five ish.
But it didn't because the
drag was higher than anticipated.
But that's why you do the flight, right?
You don't know everything I wrote.
And it's a really complicated, especially
with such a strange rocket.
It's very, very strange
ratio of length to diameter
and.
So the GPS receiver was inside
this full metal jacket, so no signal at
all, and our idea was while it
comes down, we will find a fix because we
had had three minutes to get a
fix.
OK. In theory, the
problem was that when it opened, it
opened like 10 seconds too late because
somehow we don't know why the avionics to
avionics computer did not detect
the highest point.
This is a software problem.
We are not responsible because this stuff
was bought.
OK, so it
was the only the only equipment that was
not made in-house, OK?
And it failed. So we have learned that
lessons we will make our own
avionics for next time anyway.
It felt like for 10 seconds.
And you can imagine if you let something
fall for 10 seconds, it has like 360
kilometers per hour and then
it opens like you saw there in
mid-air.
And the parachute, the drug trade was
especially designed for such a case.
Otherwise it was just ripped into a
thousand pieces. So it just ripped at one
point
and the rocket fell faster than expected.
So after 120 seconds
of full telemetry and
the first fix showing up
because we saw the time it
fell into the water, so we
had no data. But in principle, if
you put on a fiberglass reddam
from the beginning, what we do next time,
then you will get to fix,
at least during the time he recovers
from this very fast.
And because, of course, this is beyond
the parameters of normal GPS systems,
there are people that have
picked up.
Some may be sitting here in the room.
Yeah, yeah.
If somebody thinks about this,
come to us.
Really interesting device.
I think it was some question from AC
yet or another question.
What are your problems
or points against using,
uh, the balloons
instead of the rockets?
No, no, I have no points against
using balloons instead of rockets.
They are just totally different.
The one is very pointy
and the one is very round and the one
goes very fast.
Very slow.
Yeah, I have only one problem
launching rockets from balloons because
pointy and round no good.
OK, OK,
three more questions. So we start over
there, number one.
You spoke about sensors, maybe
I didn't get it, but could you please
explain a little bit more about the
sensors? Are you using and what do you do
with the data?
And maybe you can especially comment on
whether you thought about plugging a
camera on your rocket.
What was the last part of a camera?
Yeah, yeah. We had a camera.
It was lost.
It was lost during integration, it's
worse as well as we had the camera there.
We had the space there and the avionics
bay and we don't know exactly
what happened. Somehow the USB connector
got loose and it was destroyed.
We tried everything to revive it, but it
was dead and we couldn't get a new one
because of that.
Do you have a movie of that
of the destruction of the camera camera
so that the camera film until
its end?
No, no, no, no.
Before the launch, during integration,
the camera was destroyed by integrating
it.
So we now know that we need to backup
camera. OK.
OK.
But the question of the sensors is, of
course, interesting.
We use inertial measurement sensors,
which are totally common nowadays.
You can buy them like 10 degree,
ten degree of freedom, sense of boards on
the Internet for like 15 euros where you
have a gyroscope
with all free access, the accelerometer
and the barometer.
And we also use a module which
goes up to 24 G, all three axis
additionally, so
you can you can follow the trajectory of
of the rocket. And this was what was on
board. And of course, the most important
thing for the height is the barometric
sensor, which was about a
180 of Bush, which has calibration
on board and everything.
Very nice temperature compensation
and extremely cheap.
So there other sensors, too, but
they are so cheap today.
It's just no comparison
to like 10 years ago where you really
had to make a bridge and very
high sophisticated 24,
82 or whatever.
Yeah, it's very, very cheap today.
So we had just trajectory
measurements, inertial measurements and
the pressure.
And we wanted to do also measurements
of the temperature on the tip.
But that didn't work out because we had
the problem with the antenna, which
changes, and there was a temperature on
the tip because that would you would have
to stagnation temperature.
And from that you can also deduce the
speed of the rocket relative to
the atmosphere.
Yeah. So these are the typical
observables that we use at the beginning.
And of course, later on we want to use
more mature meteorological observables.
And so you are
storing the data of that census
on site.
What luckily we didn't, otherwise
we wouldn't have had one by it.
No, we send it directly to stream
downwards on 70 centimeter bend.
It's not a lot of bandwidth.
That's why we don't have too much data.
It's like a 30
kilohertz or so on bandwidth
and we send just animal sentences
downward. So like the sentence to just
get an ADC sentence in an e-mail sentence
and so on, and just starts
on two separate locations, on two laptops
in real time.
And of course, we have also SD on
board where it is streamed on.
But if this card is lost, it's lost.
That's a problem.
So you can reproduce every launch
you do with the data.
Yeah.
Sorry, we're running out of time, so one
very short last question and then we have
to close in here.
I have a question regarding
propellent on.
Some years ago, I read about
Ellis Island consisting of ice
water, ice and aluminum powder.
Could it tell us something about it?
Yeah, sure. It's water and aluminum.
No, no, it's very fine.
Aluminum and the principal
with with with sugar as
suka. And this ellis'
is almost the same because as you know,
carbohydrate is just a carbon skeleton,
which a lot of water around it.
So what you do is that the water, bronze,
aluminum foil and the carbon also takes
a little bit of the water and then you
have CO2, aluminum oxide current
and a little bit of sodium
sodium carbonate.
And the thing with El-Aziz that it's
very difficult to store.
So unless you go to the Arctic or
Antarctic.
Not so practical because it has
to be frozen, then it's a nice
propellant. I read a lot about it because
it has a very high specific impulse and
it's it's almost inert during
handling. So it's very nice, but
it has to be cold, really cold.
And this was like spring in Denmark.
It's warm.
OK, thank you, David and Sean,
thank you very much for this very
impressive speech about the false.