This is a project I’ve been working on for the last three-ish years. The inspiration for the project came to me after reading the incredible (100 page !) document Team AeroPac’s 2012 100k’ Rocket Program. The report read like a great story, but I finished it thinking “Things would have gone better if they could have just kept the flight path more vertical.”
Being a gizmo builder looking for something unusual and challenging to build, I wanted to create a solution to high power rocket Vertical Orientation Control (VOC) that was a bit non-traditional. I’ve followed on TRF with great admiration the work of Jim Jarvis and others using the canard fin approach for VOC, and have learned quite a bit from their postings. But I wanted to create something a bit more “Rube Goldberg.”
What I’ll describe here is NOT meant to be a substitute for or an improvement on the canard fin approach to VOC. Those systems are much more capable than what I’m trying to accomplish. This system is only intended to give a gentle “nudge” to get a flying rocket back to vertical if it’s not already there. As with most of these systems, it’s real power and utility comes when flying multi-stage rockets.
This project has always been about VOC, but it took an interesting, unexpected and fun sideroad during development. The early-stage prototypes that have been flying for the last few years are something I call “NoseCam”. These early prototypes do not have VOC capabilities, but they were part of the platform I needed to get there.
As the name implies, NoseCam is a system with a video camera in the nose of the rocket. It provides a spinning nose shell that “de-spins” a flight video by preventing the camera from spinning along with the rest of the rocket during flight. Behind the scenes, the system is also monitoring the orientation of the rocket in flight, so that the video camera is always on the “high side” of the rocket. The simplest way to understand this is that when the rocket arcs over at apogee, the horizon will always be level and right-side-up in the video frame. These early systems produced some very nice flight videos, and avoided what I liked to call the dreaded “vomit cam” that you get when your rocket (and camera) are spinning 1000dps !
This is a previous post with NoseCam videos for those not familiar with the system. If you scroll through the entire post there are videos of several flights made during system development.
https://www.rocketryforum.com/threads/two-stage-flight-with-video-stabilization.172553/
These photos and the following video of my most recent two-stage NoseCam flight at URRG in August, 2022. Again, all of these videos use a NoseCam without VOC capability.
Being a gizmo builder looking for something unusual and challenging to build, I wanted to create a solution to high power rocket Vertical Orientation Control (VOC) that was a bit non-traditional. I’ve followed on TRF with great admiration the work of Jim Jarvis and others using the canard fin approach for VOC, and have learned quite a bit from their postings. But I wanted to create something a bit more “Rube Goldberg.”
What I’ll describe here is NOT meant to be a substitute for or an improvement on the canard fin approach to VOC. Those systems are much more capable than what I’m trying to accomplish. This system is only intended to give a gentle “nudge” to get a flying rocket back to vertical if it’s not already there. As with most of these systems, it’s real power and utility comes when flying multi-stage rockets.
This project has always been about VOC, but it took an interesting, unexpected and fun sideroad during development. The early-stage prototypes that have been flying for the last few years are something I call “NoseCam”. These early prototypes do not have VOC capabilities, but they were part of the platform I needed to get there.
As the name implies, NoseCam is a system with a video camera in the nose of the rocket. It provides a spinning nose shell that “de-spins” a flight video by preventing the camera from spinning along with the rest of the rocket during flight. Behind the scenes, the system is also monitoring the orientation of the rocket in flight, so that the video camera is always on the “high side” of the rocket. The simplest way to understand this is that when the rocket arcs over at apogee, the horizon will always be level and right-side-up in the video frame. These early systems produced some very nice flight videos, and avoided what I liked to call the dreaded “vomit cam” that you get when your rocket (and camera) are spinning 1000dps !
This is a previous post with NoseCam videos for those not familiar with the system. If you scroll through the entire post there are videos of several flights made during system development.
https://www.rocketryforum.com/threads/two-stage-flight-with-video-stabilization.172553/
These photos and the following video of my most recent two-stage NoseCam flight at URRG in August, 2022. Again, all of these videos use a NoseCam without VOC capability.
Last edited: