FLYING R/C Lunar Module Quadcopter project

Crazy!

Some recent activities. Last Saturday, helped with a demo launch for a local “Space Day” event. Spectators were several dozen kids and parents. Took the Lunar Module to display, and possibly fly if the winds were not to bad. By launch time, the wind was OK. Was originally going to fly it at the end of the rocket launches. But with the demo rockets being flown off of two racks, then down time for recovery and loading more models on the pads, there was nothing going on for a few minutes. So, I flew the Lunar Module for 3-4 minutes till the next group of rockets were ready to fly. And did the same one more time foe another 3-4 minutes of flying.



So, the Lunar Module became something like “intermission entertainment”, or halftime show, twice. And with that, I guess I can call the model “operational” now, since it has flown for public spectators, not just at a couple of club rocket launches.


Sunday, the moon and sun aligned, plus clear sky, to allow for some unique video I’ve been wanting to get once the model got “pretty”.



I set up my camera on a tripod and zoomed in on the moon as close as possible (20X zoom I think). Was windier than I would have liked. That affected some of the flying so it was not as smooth or as accurate as i would have liked. Although I got some incredible moments at about 8 minutes into the video as descent rate, velocity, and camera view elevation angle worked out great.

It was tricky to do since the model was often 300 to 500 feet away horizontally. The wind was coming from the east, or from the moon. So a lot of the flying was done with the model front facing towards the moon. The “Alt hold” worked to hold altitude, but when the model moved forward (towards the moon), the diagonal camera angle made the model appear to get lower. And moving from the moon (drifting with wind, towards camera) it appeared to rise up when the actual altitude was the same. After reviewing the footage, I wish I’d done a few things differently. So I plan to get some more footage with the moon, but it will lave to wait for another day (MONTH) when the moon and sun and skies allow ( The next two days the sky was overcast and now moonrise is at sunset or at night so that blows making any attempts for more than 3 weeks.).

Animated GIF preview:



I shot that video on two flights about 60-90 minutes apart. First flight the moon was lower in the sky, moon appearing a bit hazy. Second flight the moon was higher up, sky a bit darker, moon much sharper. In the video, some of the audio is original, I was playing some music and also Apollo-11 audio on a boombox, from a soundtrack I am working on playing real-time for doing a flight routine. So in some of the video you hear the original audio. For the rest, I replaced the original audio with another piece of music which works for that video’s purposes (I won’t be using that replacement music for the flight show soundtrack).

Youtube link:

[video=youtube;pc6bWKZF6lI]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pc6bWKZF6lI[/video]

Where's the "Like" button?

I have put together an audio file with some music as well as Apollo-11 landing audio. To play while doing "public" flying of the model. Here is a video of an early practice, it's a work in progress as is the audio file.

[video=youtube;tGhhxU3t9YE]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGhhxU3t9YE&feature=related[/video]

Need to work on the landing approach more, will begin to just loop the last 2 minutes of audio and do touch-and-goes to practice the landing.

Here is a photo from one of the flying sessions.

So, I was taking photos of my Lunar Module Quadcopter and some new accessories.



When all of a sudden it turned into the plot for a bad Ed Wood / Roger Corman movie:



Attack of the Monster Moon Cat!

Plan 9 Lives From Outer Space!

Close Encounters of the CAT kind



Was totally unplanned, had let him outside an hour before and he decided to walk over to check it out for awhile.

The moonwalker figures (via eBay) are a bit big in scale (1/12 compared to the LM at 1/16), but close enough for general purposes. I also plan to have them near the landing area when I fly and land the LM on some public flights (will also shoot some video of that, eventually).

In the first photo (no cat), I modified the contrast and exposure settings of a copy of the file to make the shadows more like the real Apollo lunar photos. Compare with the shadows in the cat photos.

Update - after playing around some more with the first image in Photoshop. Just ignore who/what took the image.....and the blades, and motors....

Look great! :clap::clap::clap::clap:

More proof that NASA faked the landing ... :roll::roll::roll::roll::roll::roll:

So, TODAY, I got to commemorate the 48th landing of Apollo-11, with my LM Quadcopter.

I wanted to land at 2:17 PM Central, the time that Eagle landed. But a real-world agricultural helicopter flew into the area, so I had to land early and wait for it to get far enough away. Accompanying the Lunar Module flying, I was using a soundtrack with music plus flight control audio from the landing. But my iPod overheated in the sun before getting to the actual landing part (I’d made a poor approach letting it get too low anyway). So, I’ve had better flights and landings, but this was a good flight.










Video of the first flight that I had to cut short:

[video=youtube;Y_Ri9G2heR0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_Ri9G2heR0[/video]

Here is video of the second flight:

[video=youtube;WuKGkVOqnvY]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuKGkVOqnvY[/video]

I really enjoyed watching you fly the LM, George. Nice work!

A year ago, I posted this thread about my R/C Lunar Module Quadcopter project.

It has been a few months since my last posting, and a few months since it last flew.

I took it to NARAM-59 and flew it a few times. Took second place in the Imagination Celebration, Chan Stevens and I did a dual effort with Chan’s Estes Saturn-V launched, followed by the LM, but the Saturn did not take off (turned out the pad leads were swapped). Peter Alway took this photo during some other flying:



And here is one of Chris Taylor’s:



Here is a video by Chris Taylor of some other flying at NARAM, queued up to a flight of the LM. It was pretty windy, was buffeted, and I did not have a GPS lock, so I could not fly it as well close-up as Chris & I really wanted. Vibrations caused a couple of the legs to rotate so that is why some footpads look tilted.

Use this time-queued link: https://youtu.be/zjhYeMJhU8I?t=166

Or, click below and go to 2:47 into the video:

[video=youtube;zjhYeMJhU8I]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjhYeMJhU8I?t=166[/video]

I flew the LM a couple of times back home, but had a disaster in late August. It was hovering at about 20 feet up, when one blade acted weird and it fell vertically to the ground in a powered tumble. What happened was a prop nut had come loose, and a Quadcopter can’t fly with only 3 props trying to control it. I didn’t have a camera with me at the time, and still haven’t felt like getting it out to take photos of the damage. The damage was not TOO bad, all things considered (good thing it was not 200 feet up, as it had been a few minutes before). The Ascent stage got a bit dinged, but the main damage was to the legs, which already had accumulated some damage over summer. So I need to get some more Alumilite and cast new replacement parts for some of the leg strut assemblies and footpads. And make up some new main leg struts. This also has delayed adding final touches such as antennas, and upgrading the Descent engine from a cardboard cone to a vac-formed bell of a more accurate shape.

I still plan at some point to make a "serious" edited video of the model, maybe a couple of videos. But some of that will require shooting new video, one planned for a different more "moonish" location. And I hope sometime to get good air-to-air video of the LM flying, with a second multicopter flying near it to get the video. But none of those video shoots till next spring.

It has been interesting to look at a videos from the first two days I flew the model. I had not yet changed it to fly in "altitude hold" mode, so I had to jockey the throttle stick a lot, so it did not flay as smoothly. And accounted for some hard landings that damaged the crude landing legs until I changed to Altitude Hold. And it had not been tuned yet. So it wasn't the smooth flying model early on that it became later, but I knew from the first 10 seconds of flight that it was working pretty well anyway (my fear had been it would be a marginal flyer which would not be worth continuing). I will say that the way I HOPED it might fly when I first planned it, it indeed turned out to fly just that good, or better! Plenty of power, smooth to fly after tweaks and tuning. With a nice flight duration capability, at 8 minutes with a safety margin on 3000 mAh LiPos and about 12 minutes with a safety margin on 5000 mAh Lipos (I got two of those).

Do I have some other neat space model multicopter project in mind sometime?

Been over a year since I posted in this thread. The model crashed in late August 2017, a prop nut came off when it was 20 feet up, and a QUADcopter can't fly on three props. It tumbled end over end. If it had been 200 feet up, it might have been totaled. Fortunately most of the damage was concentrated to the landing gear. Other things came up , and I did not have a pressing need to fix it (yet), but I would have if there'd been some 49th anniversary event to fly it at this summer. But I'll have it fixed by Spring.

The end of my last post (Yoda) hints at another project that I had in mind but it had to go on the back burner. I am hopeful to get that other project going over winter (it's not Apollo related).

Anyway, doing a google search tonight I found there *IS* another. Well, someone else, Bill Marvin, built a LM Quadcopter, this year. He did it more from the approach of using an existing 450 size Quadcopter and building a Lunar Module body/structure to enclose most of it except for the arms. Interestingly his seems to be about the same scale (1/16), he based his on scaling up the Metal Earth Lunar Module. Here's the video:



I'll be surprised if nobody else builds flying Lunar Module Quads, with the 50th anniversary coming up next July.

I wrote in November 2017:

"Do I have some other neat space model multicopter project in mind sometime?
Took longer to get back to that project than intended, but it is finally underway!

Rocket Boosted Mars Lander Quadcopter. Follow up replies at this thread:

https://www.rocketryforum.com/threads/mars-lander-rocket-quadcopter-project.151995/