Off-Nominal - 204 - It’s Not Delivery, It’s Deorbit (with Joe Barnard)

Episode Date: August 1, 2025

Jake and Anthony are joined by Joe Barnard to catch up and finally discuss High Steaks!TopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeEpisode 204 - It’s Not Delivery, It’s Deorbit (with Joe Barnard) - YouTubeCan Supersonic Heating Cook Steak? - YouTubeHigh Steaks Flight 1 - Onboard Footage 50% Speed with Data Overlay - YouTubeSmallest 4K 120fps Camera Possible - YouTubeUsing Condoms to Make a Rocket Nosecone - YouTubeBuilding a Supersonic Rocket Guidance System - YouTubeThe #1 Reason Rocket Parachutes Fail - YouTubeHalf Cat RocketryAustralia’s first orbital-class rocket didn’t make it far off the launch pad - Ars TechnicaGilmour Space on X: “Liftoff completed, launch tower cleared, stage 1 tested. Awesome result for a first test launch.”Follow JoeBPS.space - YouTubeJoe Barnard (@joebarnard) / TwitterBPS.SpaceFollow Off-NominalSubscribe to the show! - Off-NominalSupport the show, join the DiscordOff-Nominal (@offnom) / TwitterOff-Nominal (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceFollow JakeWeMartians Podcast - Follow Humanity's Journey to MarsWeMartians Podcast (@We_Martians) | TwitterJake Robins (@JakeOnOrbit) | TwitterJake Robins (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceFollow AnthonyMain Engine Cut OffMain Engine Cut Off (@WeHaveMECO) | TwitterMain Engine Cut Off (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceAnthony Colangelo (@acolangelo) | TwitterAnthony Colangelo (@[e-mail]) - jawns.club 🐘Off-Nominal MerchandiseOff-Nominal Logo TeeWeMartians Shop | MECO Shop

TLS and go for main engine, start. Well, no worldwide satellite outages this week, Jake. No, Starlink has their shit together this week, so I'm here. Don't say it that early into the show. Jesus. Yeah, I should be careful because it is a little stormy. It's the wet season, so we're getting some flitnery stuff here, but we'll see. The lightning is past my house, so we'll see if my very old lightning rod actually works

instead of hitting the internet lines. So we'll find out. So it'll be a fun ride for us and Joe in particular. Joe, you're back. As long as it's taller, right? Howdy? How are you? I mean, the most pumped to have you on about this topic.

You're probably relieved to finally come on the show and not to have us ask about this topic ever again. I'm not going to lie, man. So I've been on this show, I don't know, three or four times now. And I think every show we talk about the Meat Rocket. it. And every show I'm like, it's coming up. We're going to do it. We're going to do it. And it feels really good to not have to be like, it's going to happen and just be like, we did it. And genuinely, every time we talked about it, it felt like it was just a few months away.

And, man, aerospace schedules, dude. You're not kidding. Yeah. It's an excellent video. If you're watching, you're watching, and that's not on a live stream. I would recommend pausing, going and watching in full, plus all the material that they get so lucky to continue having more material the entire time. So there's several hours of content in that one hour.

Yes. Yeah. Does it feel like a Peak Joe video? It feels like a Peak Joe video. Not to say you're going to get worse from here, but just that this is an excellent version of Joe. Dude, it's all downhill. If I, like not try anymore.

No, it's a, it's a, fun video. I worked really hard on it. I'm really proud of it. It's just like it's my favorite thing, which is it's a really high effort shit post. And so I hope the video does it service. It's just like goofy. We don't ask why we do this. We ask how, which is like, can you really cook meat by going to Mach 3? And I don't want to spoil it, but the answer is yes. You didn't spoil it. In fact, there's a count. No. Yeah, I mean, like, by the numbers, it cooked. Visually, the jury's out on that.

Yeah. Some countries, that's cooked. So. So you're not getting your food license. Like a really fancy restaurant. It's what you're saying, right? I do have a funny bit of lore, though. I didn't put this in the video because I kind of figured it would happen.

I made a restaurant on Google Maps. I called it the high stakes bistro. I pinned it at the landing location of the rocket where the meat actually came down under parachutes. And I got 18 people to review it. It received, I think, an average of 3.9 stars. Some people did not like how expensive the meat was. Some people said they had to wait a really long time for a table at the restaurant.

And then Google shut it down. So sad. They thought it was worth the effort to shut that down. That's unbelievable. It's so stupid because there's a bunch of other stuff in the area that's like goofy. There's like a historical landmark where, you know, one of the college rocket teams like sent a minivan off the edge of the road on accident. You know, it's like there's a bunch of stuff out by far that just doesn't. I thought it would be fine.

You're not going to accidentally end up there? Like it's not going to accidentally drive all the way there for steak. That's so funny because it's like it feels to me like it's a paying a lot of attention to something. because like outside of the United States, man, they don't give a shit. Like how much random stuff are along the Google Maps in Mexico? It's almost useless. Like it's like, there's like just restaurants with like the names are spelled wrong. Sometimes they're just in the middle of the jungle.

There's just like businesses that have never existed and they're just pointing to someone's house. There's just like all sorts of wild stuff like that. I love that. I love that. Maybe if I hadn't labeled it as a restaurant, but a historical landmark. Because I think the restaurant might be tough if people are actually hungry because there's nothing else in the area. So someone may have been like upset that it was a decently reviewed steakhouse. It's a honey pot.

The meat rocket's done. It finally happened. I'm glad to talk to you about it. We used Wagyu beef, very high grade. It was actually pretty good when we ate it. and yeah it's a good project great we talked about enough i'm just kidding we have 8000 questions about this so many things jake did you i first skipped over the part where you're drinking something

fun down there in your stormy areas okay so i'm going to we're going to share an experience today um so as you know i've been making mead so i've this one to show you okay so this is This is the first batch I made. Okay. Oh, wow. And you can see bottled 4th of August, 2024. So that was a year ago now. This was not drinkable when I put it in the bottle.

It was very bad because it was the first one I made and I did not know what I was doing. And so everything I read was like, just age it. It'll work. And so I have four of these bottles. I'm going to open one every year until it tastes good, is my plan. and I thought I would do that today if you want to see it. Yeah, and the theme of doing something that may give you gastrointestinal distress. Yes.

This is a good plan. We'll see. I don't know if it'll be good. It might be good. It might be still bad. This one has oranges and blackberry in it. I just went straight for the fruit meads. Like I knew what I was doing.

That was a mistake. I won't do that again. Well, I can't make my first one again, I guess. That's the plan. Wait, so it's the first time you're trying it in a year, right? Yeah, yeah. So you made five bottles. I drank one or you sipped one?

I only made four. Like I sipped it when I filled the bottle up. I just took a little sampler and it was not good. And yet you were like, I bet this will work out. I'm going to fill these up. Well, that's what they say is like aging will just mellow out any bad flavor. So the citrus is very strong. And the, I didn't know what I was doing.

I didn't feed the yeast very well. and it was kind of stressed out. So, you know, to get like weird off flavors and stuff. But I don't know. The clarity looks good. Like that. Pretty nice, right? It's very pretty.

Wow. Yeah. It's a real experience. I did not. I really didn't know we were getting this kind of, how was it? Well, it isn't good. Should we one shot the reaction? I don't know.

Hmm. Did you bring a backup drink just in case? No, I did not. How committed are we? Okay. This is interesting. Okay. So when I put this in here in the bottle a year ago, there was like lots of like fusel thing,

which is like that kind of like that basically they call like rocket fuel flavor in a meat or it's like the bad kinds of alcohols. It's like you can almost imagine it like nail polish removal, like that kind of acetone. Like like pure ethanol kind of taste. Yeah, kind of. I guess. Yeah. That's gone.

But there's something else here now. What is it? I can taste the orange. I don't know. It can taste the orange. Hmm. All right. I have to think on this.

I have to think on it. Not that mellow. Is it drinkable? I mean, is it enjoyable? Or is it? Maybe like halfway enjoyable. Okay.

Okay. I can taste the fruit and I can taste the honey, but there's something else in your tuna. I just don't know what it is yet. So I've got to see. It's probably not good, but we're going to roll and hope that none of that presents itself in 51 minutes. This one, I didn't back sweeten this either.

So all the sugar's gone. It fermented dry, like just straight to the bottom. So it's very, very dry and it's very, um, it's like a dry wine. Joe and I definitely know what back sweeten it means. Yeah, I know, I know what that means, but just for everyone else. But I just, we both know what that means. But I think Joe did it a couple times to the rocket. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You turn out the sugar into alcohol when you ferment it, right? So if, if you let it run its course, all the sugar goes, away and you have alcohol. But sometimes you want a sweet drink. And so you put sugar back into it and you have to do it in the right way because otherwise it'll just start fermenting again and you'll get more alcohol. So you have to stabilize it. And then you put more for me, you'd put more more honey back in. But I didn't do that with this one. So this is just dry. I mean, today on this show, we have two very long running segments paying off. We have Jake's meat journey and high stakes. Like this is a perfect pairing between these two things. Because

we've been talking about this meat for so long. Like since Jake moved to Mexico, I think we've been talking about this meat. It's a big day. It's a big day. Yeah. It's great. Yeah. Did you bring any very long awaited drinks, Joe?

I don't have long awaited drinks, but I do have some, I have two things. One, I want to put everyone watching onto what we've been doing, me and my friends. I got, I have a cigarette with me. This is, we call this a fridge cigarette. It's a diet Coke. So you, you, I, I'm doing this with gum, so I don't smoke and, you know, whatever if you smoke. But like I do this with gum and I do this diet Coke.

It's you offer something, you're like, hey, man, you want to smoke really quick? And then you hand them a piece of gum or a diet Coke. So I've got, I've got a cheeky fridge sig. But we're going to, we're going to double fist it today, which is I also have a butterscotch candy soda. I just went to Las Vegas last weekend to help my friends who are. in like a battlebots competition. And along the way, we stopped at this restop that has like the weirdest sodas. There was ranch dressing soda, pumpkin pie, a birthday cake soda.

There was like a buffalo wing soda. The ranch dressing was by far the worst. That was awful. The smell was so much worse than the taste, but it was not good. The buffalo wing soda, not that bad. Can't tell if Jake's back to the ranch or maybe. read. No which.

It's definitely the ranch. The ranch makes me gay, though just thinking about when you said to smell, I was like, oh. We're going to give the butterscotch a try. I have high hopes. Is that what you're telling me?

Okay. Yeah, I bought the store. Did they also have all the weird like Doritos, the weird flavored Doritos? They might have had a Doritos soda. They had a butter soda and allegedly,

I didn't taste that one, but apparently it was good. Is that like butter beer? like Harry Potter butter beer because that's awful downright awful I don't know why they sell that to people in Orlando it's horrible

check yourself butter beer rules it's amazing okay all right I've got the review here so this is the influencer thing where they put the hand behind

whatever they're doing this is from Melba's Fixin's this is presumably this is Melba the slogan is get your fixins so we think this is maybe a southern endeavor. It's pretty good. It's, you know, when you take it,

I feel like this is like a sour beer where you're like, ooh, I could have maybe a full one of these, but I don't want to. And like halfway through this, I'm going to get a little bored, but it's great right now. Back to the fridge, sig. Yeah.

This show is like that Jackson stream where the guy ate the peach after the launch. This is a real food review segment. I just have a Cape May IPA because I have those and I was at the pitch this weekend and it's a drink of one. They've gotten better. They, I'm a low-key, hot take. K-May IPA or Kate May brewing generally when they started out. Terrible. Did not have a good launch.

Good now. They really got there. I admire the improvement. So that's my short review to throw one on the pile there. They're getting the most improved player award. Apparently, Melba. Melba's got to step it up a little bit and Jake definitely does. So yeah.

I'm rock with Melba. Yeah. We have, I don't know which angle we should start in on this. Do you have a particular thing to start? Where should we start? Where should we start? So why? Why did you do this?

Tell us about your life. How'd you get here? You guys cut off. Oh, no. We're here, we're here. We're here. What happened? Okay, okay, we're back.

We're back. I'm here. That's so weird. saying? Jake asked why did you do this? And you were like, cut off? We don't ask these things because they're, what's the saying? I think I'm combining three or four phrases. Because they add. Yeah, because we

do them because we thought they would be easy. I mean, the real, I mean, the fake answer, which is kind of real is that like, I love a high effort shit post. But the real answer is that it actually does, I want to do a space shot in, you know, at some amount of time. I want to fly a rocket above 100 kilometers, just suborbital. And it does burn down a lot of technical debt to fly the meat rocket. Like, there's actually a lot of stuff that went right on it. And in the two or three years prior to this, the highest flight that I had done was 10 kilometers.

and the flight, like the flight was okay, but it didn't really work. It kind of failed. The parachute ripped. The rocket hit the ground at like 180 miles an hour. It did not have a great time doing that. And so I learned a lot, spent the next few years, like really refining a bunch of my process and how I build stuff. And high stakes, as much as it is like a goofy, silly rocket is also, there's a bunch of

stuff on board, avionics-wise, telemetry, flight software, composites, manufacturing, just getting better at like onboard cameras, getting better at running a launch process. I was like stressed, but mostly in a good way on the day of launch instead of stressed, but in a chaotic, really bad way for the first time that I tried to get a rocket to 10 kilometers. So the full answer is that like it actually, it was a really good exercise of like running the same. program. Just say it. This is a Gemini program. Yeah. This is Gemini. And so I just want to get better at doing the stuff. And Meet Rocket was a good opportunity to combine two things, which is like, fun, silly, goofy project that is like easily clickable on YouTube and also helps me get better at Rockets. Yeah. I think that's where I, the biggest questions I came away from watching it was just like, you know, you talk about this huge engine that you used on it. That's the clip right there, just scrolling down the end.

engine table to find the biggest numbers. It sounds like what you did. But like I don't have a good, I don't have a good understanding of that stuff. Like is how big of the engine is this compared to what you've normally flown? And how much bigger do they get for amateur rocketry? Because like this is an interesting space where most people don't get to, I don't think. Yeah. This is a, this is certainly at the upper end of what you can purchase.

You can purchase motors that are slightly more powerful than this. And it really depends where you want to. cap it off, like, can purchase is also sort of a problematic term because, like, if you know the right people, they will, like, make you a motor and sell it to you. But in terms of motors that are, like, routinely purchased and flown by hobby rocketeers, this is certainly on the upper end. And the problem is actually not so much the amount of impulse it has. It's how fast it dumps it out the back. So, like, the real problem. Yeah, it's like, it's like three, three point seconds, something like that. It depends where you want to cut it off. But if you have the same amount

of impulse and you burn it slower, you can still reach high speeds, but you're reaching those high speeds much higher up in the atmosphere. And so the problem with a really fast, hard burn is you're like really in the soup of how much air there is around you. Like max queue is immediately. Yeah. You have much higher dynamic pressure. You have, and good for us. You have much higher heating. on the nose. And yeah, it's just, it's a monster of a motor. Jeez. I love this highlight reel of everyone else that's flown this thing.

Actually, yeah, I did want to talk about that too. I knew, like, it is sort of hobby rocketry lore that the CTI N5800, that's the motor, is a bit of a monster and will like shred your rocket. And I knew that was the case. but I had never watched all of the clips of it shredding rockets back to back. And there's like a lot of them. Like they didn't all make it into the video. Is that good motivation and like this is a hill you want to climb? Or was that bad motivation?

No, it's good. You're that kind of guy? You let it fuel you. Yeah, it's fun. You get like a little bit of an ego hit to be like, yeah, I'm going to do the most powerful one. That's the one I want. Yeah. Yeah, it's probably not the most healthy driver, but it is, I think we have all, at one point or another felt the urge of like, I want the biggest, I want the biggest one.

Yeah. So is this the same that would be used for the space shot or does there, is there? No, yeah. This is much smaller than the space shot. So the way that like, how do I, how do I say this? So like a falconine and electron both get to orbit, but they're like carrying a lot, they're carrying like very different things and very different scales of things. You know, an electron is like a toy compared to a falcon, even though they're both enormous.

And I am trying to not just get a rocket above 100 kilometers, but bring a lot of stuff up there with me. And so the rocket that I am building space shot wise is much bigger than it would need to be if the only goal was cross that 100 kilometer mark. So you could use this motor from the meat rocket and probably a motor maybe half the size, but if you were really careful about reducing cross-sectional area or basically just having a really thin upper stage, you could almost certainly get something like this to space. People do it too with darts. Sometimes it actually can be more efficient to dump all your impulse at the very start.

and just have like a tungsten rod, like the opposite of rods from God. You just have like a tungsten rod on top, and it will like punch through the rest of the atmosphere well enough. Yeah. Rod's from Todd. Rod's from Todd. So there's a lot of ways to skin the cat, which is a crazy saying, but there's a lot of ways to skin the cat.

You could use this motor to do the spaceship, but I am going bigger than that, which is why I have to make my own. stuff. You're saying because you have other shit to do on the rocket, right? You want to have the cameras. You want to have all the other like payload effectively, right? That you're doing content production with. Yeah.

Yeah, we want to, I would like to get a third person shot. So I'd like to shoot out a couple of little cubes at Apogy that turned back. Oh, yeah. Hmm. Talk about this at open sauce. Great moments. Which is like when start, when Starship finally manages to make it to see go and also deploy a payload, both things that have turned out to be harder than anyone expected.

When it manages to do those things, like, why aren't, why wouldn't they put a camera on one of those Starlink things and just get a third person shot of the rocket? And that's what I want for the space shot too. Is that what you were testing when you accidentally deployed the main, like right after separation? Is that also a little subscale test? No, no, that was, that was an accident. The details of this are, too hard to explain in a podcast succinctly, and the video does a pretty good job explaining it, but there were

a couple of parts of that flight where we just got genuinely very lucky that it didn't go worse. Yeah, yeah, that was pretty wild, actually. I enjoyed that part. That was a good bit. I've watched this again this morning at breakfast with my almost five-year-old and he was so concerned at the parachute

sequence. He was like really desperately concerned about it and asking me a thousand questions of like, why did that thing do that and why did it come back? So yeah, it was it was riveting even down to the age of four. That's great. That's awesome. I tried to edit it in a way that made you feel a little bit of the stress of how it feels when it was flying to when you're out in the desert and, you know, there's no music, it's silent. You have no idea what's what's going to happen next. Like the rocket could be on its way back to you really, really fast. And I tried to edit in a way that felt stressful.

I think I did it. I think I got there. We went on the journey. Yeah. There also, like, here's some things that I was thinking as I was watching this. I'm going to skip to the part where you're setting up the ground station. Because, like, holy shit, dude. You have so much stuff.

Yeah. This is, you're kind of the quintessential, like, I started a hobby, and all of a sudden, this is, like, I own all these things. Yeah. Yeah. So this has to be exiting the word amateur rocketry. Like we're getting into how much of a ground station? You have more of a ground station than some like rocket companies doing their first launch.

So it's a little deceptive because we do need quite a bit to like keep the rocket, keep it, keep tabs on the rocket. But we only actually need one computer. The reason there's a second computer there is because I run a live stream. for patrons, which is a great cue me up to do a little plug here. You're doing all of the things that, this is my point is that you're doing as much as these other companies. In some cases, they just hire NASA Space Flight and you're like, I'm doing the whole damn thing. Right, right, right. NASA Space Flight does a great job too, but, you know, I don't think it's worth their time to come out here. Yeah, and actually, the other problem is

I didn't have a Starlink at the time, and the way that I used to stream in the desert was so backwards and weird. I had like this remote modem set up and I would like pop the SIM card out of my phone and put it into the remote modem. And then there are, I came up with a bunch of commands that I can run in terminal that trick because I don't have a plan

that allows me to tether my phone to a computer. Oh, yeah, okay. Right, right. Which you would usually be like, oh, well, what are you going to do? But what are you going to do is you open terminal and you change the TTP or TTL, the time to something in the way that like the internet works on the computer. And if you do, if you, uh, Verizon uses the TTP threshold to like determine if you're tethering the phone.

And so if you get it low enough, if you like manually input it, you trick Verizon into thinking that your phone is the computer. So anyway, all of this stuff is a holdover from the when the project was like, a lot scrappier and until recently when I got a Starlink which has made things like way easier but half of the gear you see there is just to try and support the streaming setup it's a lot it's a lot of coordination and you've got all these people yeah that are like in it to win it with you which is awesome yeah just my friends too they're they're total chillers it's like it makes an enormous difference to have a bunch of hands out there you can see in some of these shots, people are carrying away ladders, people are moving stuff around. And a lot of it is just

friends who are like, this is such a goofy project. I'm going to go help them do it. But do you have like an orientation session? Like when you're driving out to the desert, you're like, all right, listen, when we're out there, I'm going to shout commands, whoever thinks they understand it, go grab the thing I'm talking about. We had a couple of like briefing things, right? We had a couple of like, hey, here's what we're going to do. Here's what we're working on. And then there's there's parts in the video too where you see us talking about like should we move the ground station the telemetry isn't good here. So it there is a lot of like crowd sourced opinions on how to run the flight more on the engineering side than just having people like move stuff around. And then purely because of how big it is, I have it in the background, but you can also see it in the video like it's a hefty rocket.

You can't you can like barely carry it as one person. So you just need the extra hands. I need some help. Yeah. That's crazy. I wanted to ask, so I think one of the things that's kind of low-key, very interesting about what you do is these control boards, like these avionics boards and stuff, all your BPS things. Like, they kind of just in the videos I've watched at least, they sort of just kind of appear in the background. Like, oh, we're building this rocket.

We're launching a Christmas tree to space. Oh, and by the way, I just sneak in one of these BPSA avionics boards and you're to do all the things I wanted to do. But you make those? Where do those come from? I feel like you don't talk about them as much as you should. Yeah, I used to talk about it a lot more. But yeah, it's all custom boards. It's all custom.

And actually, I can flex this now in the advent of AI coding or whatever. That is all handwritten code, baby. That is 100% organic, homegrown code. No vibes. Because almost all of it was written in like 2019, 2020. And around that time, I had been making all of these new revisions of flight computers for individual projects. And it was like, this is crazy.

It's expensive. It is like really hard to like rewrite a bunch of code every time or make it fit exactly what project I'm working on. I should just make one computer that does it all. And so that's what the computer I use on most of my stuff is. I call it Ava or all vehicle avionics. And yeah, it is, I mean, maybe it deserves like an update video or two. But having custom avionics solves a lot of really weird problems that like,

like we have these remote start cameras on the rocket. So I use these gopros. I take them apart. I cover them in thermal paste and whatever, man. The gopros are like ovens that happen to record video. But we have, like, you can see the footage here. It's unbelievably good quality footage. And in order to get those to work, you do kind of need custom avionics to do it.

Because it's just like you have a really limited time window before they overheat. In the desert. On a rocket. In the desert. When you're cooking meat. Yeah. You're not really working uphill here or working downhill here. You've got a lot going for it.

The custom avionics and everything that you're doing, you either did or have sold them? Like, is that like a business business? I always meant to ask you that. I'm like, I don't have a good sense for like, is this a market that you're doing? And this is, and BPS space is just part of the pyramid scheme. Yeah, yeah.

Just sign up for this program and get four people to sign up with you. That's a little downstream for your upstream, yeah. I started, I was selling TVC kits or Thrust Vector Control kits. And so this is like 2017, 2018, before any of the YouTube stuff had worked. So like it's a YouTube channel now that's like YouTube first basically as a business. But when it was still like a project and I was trying to turn it into a business, the first thing I did was I started telling kits so that if you wanted to add thrust vector control to your rockets, you would buy this kit, you'd go through the build process and then you'd be able to fly it instead of having to learn all about how to tune a

control system and write flight software and designing CAD, just buy the thing. It turns out that when you make a complicated control system for a rocket, it like doesn't lend itself to people who don't always read the instructions. And so what would happen is I would have like, like, A, the market was really tiny. It like didn't really support a business. It's sort of just like, let me get groceries and nothing else every month. month. And then be, you know, I don't know about you guys. Like, I don't read the instructions on a lot of stuff that I do or a lot of stuff that I build. Like, IKEA gives me furniture and it feels like a fun challenge to build it without the instructions. And that you're really like. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, it just like it ended up not being a super like.

I'm not going to call it a bad product. It just was really tough to, like, build a business around that. And so I started making YouTube videos, and that happened to work well. But you still order those, like, you, like, fab these out? Like, what is the process? Do you stockpile them and then you use them for all your future stuff? Yeah, so I, maybe once every two or three years, I'll place a big order of a bunch of boards because, like, periodically boards get burned out.

I, you know, drop them and they, I'm, like, concerned about reliability. or I slam them into the ground from time to time. And yeah, so I have a stockpile of Ava boards now. But to answer the question, I don't sell any anymore. The other thing is that anyone who does customer service in any regard knows that like, it's not that fun. Even if you're doing customer service for like people who mean well and are like trying their best, it is not that much fun.

Yeah. Yeah. That's why I always meant to ask you about it because I was like, is this like, is this a hidden thing that I don't know about? Because I don't know if it was products that like, if you know, you know, but yeah. Yeah, if it had made a ton of money or been like really successful,

like it would have been worth, the lemon would have been worth the squeeze or whatever the saying is. But it just, it like never made enough to work as a business. And then it also was really, It was just a grind. But you're getting the long tail out of it, right? Like every project that you're doing is benefiting from all the work that you did on that.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. And what was I going to say? Yeah, anyway, I used to sell computers and it turned out to, like, it changed the job from being a guy. Like, I was a guy who built rockets and, like, I got to experiment with stuff. And then, like, when I was selling computers, all I did was, like, try to. to figure out how to produce computers. And that wasn't that, that wasn't that fun. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. Manufacturing, man. It's all about services. You need to get Jake dust off the old Geek Squad.

You want to be customer support? Yeah. I don't know if you're aware of how Geek Squad fixes things, Anthony, but we would have just bought a new one on the site and swap them out. Marked it up 10%. There you go. a lot of warranties for Joe. Yeah. I can tell you a 149-99 warranty on your 349 board. If you want that. Yeah.

Yeah. Now we got their services. We got there. There it is. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You should have rocket lab yourself, Joe.

That was a problem. Yeah. You know? Yeah. It, man, I don't know. I think about the business that a lot because it also. Yeah. It just was at like way too high of a price point.

And even at that it didn't support a business. I don't know. Someone else should try, but I'm not going to do it. Yeah. That leads me to my next questions for Joe that I've never asked. How often do you get hit up by companies that are like, do you want a job running a department here? And what is the thing that's keeping you from working at a space company? Not anymore. It did happen for a little while. I think, you know, post-hot glue rocket, I've been blacklisted for most of these.

places but uh no i it doesn't happen now because i think i think it's pretty clear that like this is the job that i want to do and i wouldn't really be happier doing like program strategy at blue origin or i the other the other thing is i'm not like i'm not particularly good at one thing i'm like passable at a bunch of stuff well that doesn't really make you exactly why i'm asking about yeah no but startups like holy shit dude you've figured out all this random shit all on your own, you set up these ground stations, you did all this work, like, near single-handedly. That's, that's like startup heaven right there. It would have to be a startup that I really believed in, and that came with, like, a really

compelling equity package. And even then, yeah, compensate. Even then, like, it's just, it's like a, it's like lightning in a bottle. I don't know, having, having a YouTube channel that, like, works and supports building of these goofy rockets and I can I can kind of set my own schedule and determine the projects I do and don't want to work on. That is so cool. And it would it would take a lot to willingly give that up. To be clear, I'm not trying to convince you. I'm probably trying to explain to everyone listening why us three have that answer. Yeah, stop calling. Yeah. Yeah, I could not agree more.

I went, you know, I'm four years into freelance now. And like sometimes I just like a mad, I think of like a future cycle. What would it look like if I went back to a nine to five? Like if someone hired me and I was like, it like gives me anxiety. I'm like, no, I don't want I don't want anything to do with that. I don't want to be on a payroll anywhere. It's just, that's awful now. The burden that we bear is every once in a while, your brain goes, you should get a job.

And then you're like, no, no, no, I shouldn't. I should never do that. I should not do that thing. I had a nine to five for a few months. a like a drone company in Boston and it was really good for me. It's the only 9 to 5 I've ever had and like the structure was so good for me.

That's the only thing that I would like back is for someone else to be like you need to start work at 9 a.m. Because otherwise it's just a mess, you know? It's like a mess of schedule. It can be. It can be. Yeah. You got to just harness that, you know?

Harness the chaos. I don't remember ride the, inspiration. I did get, I got three or four interviews in with SpaceX a couple of years ago for a, it was either a position on like the octa-grabber team, like the little robot that grabs the rocket on the drone ship, or it was maybe something in Vandenberg with like plumbing. I don't, I don't know, but I failed the, I think the question I, I definitely fail. You know that, right? I for sure filled one of the technical questions.

Like pipes, maybe? I don't know. Yeah, they were asking me a question about like, one of them was like there's a, there's an oxygen leak somewhere and you need to like isolate the valves or isolate the segment where the leak is, but you don't know exactly where it is. So walk me through the sequence of like how you pick which valves to to actuate and how you know you're not going to trap oxygen.

Because I don't know if you guys know, oxygen expands 800 times when it turns into a gas. And so like the actual scary thing about liquids is not the liquid. It's the oxygen blowing up your pipes. And I failed it extremely hard. Like I did not know what I was talking about. What was your guess? What was your?

I would my mind take not doing plumbing. I would say the physical life version of get bisect like start halfway and figure out which half it is and then go halfway the other direction. See, that would have been better than my answer. Okay. I don't remember what I said. But I remember like it was like I was in third person. watching myself, like, lose the opportunity of a lifetime.

And then they asked me some weird question. I think it was one of those, like, how do you think type of questions where there's not actually a, it's like a Kobe Ashi Maru. It's like there's not actually a right answer. It's like a, and I, it was something about like, how do you put gas in a car? This is why we're not going back to these jobs. I would never make it through anywhere. Yeah.

Yeah. There's like, there's like very few interview rooms I can walk into where I wouldn't be like that, that, uh, Ron Swanson, uh, skit at the Home Depot where he says like, I know more than you. I just walks away. I'm too full of myself now. I couldn't do it. I just find that's not at all like, I mean, I'm sure for some of the roles at SpaceX, those things really deeply matter. Yeah. And, and that's my difference working in software, not hardware. But like, none of the stuff I would ask in interview questions has to do with, the actual details of your job. It's like purely who you are, what you're like, how you are, like all vibes,

much unlike your code, all vibes, right? Like, you know, because you're, just have to be a good hang. I think this,

this gets missed in a lot of like, undergrad stuff, but you have to, you gotta be a good hang. You have to be nice to be around. Yeah. Or no one's going to hire you. It doesn't matter how smart you are.

It's true. Yeah. That's why no one's hired any of us. We're just, shit, shit company just a bunch assholes so yeah yeah yeah can't hack it man geez okay hmm well uh how did it 50% footage it's oh yeah that's true we didn't even talk about that at all taste test very good it was so we we got um we got the meat at a market that's i think i think it was like we paid something like

$80, but we bought a little less than a pound. And so it came out to about $100 a pound. And so it was already really high grade meat, it was really high grade beef. And I bet it didn't taste any different than the meat raw. We didn't do like a direct comparison. But it was really good. It was very tasty.

It had been a long day in the desert. It was great to have a little treat. my buddy Charlie had like packed a Dr. Pepper in his backpack and so we slammed a Dr. Pepper and had a little meat. But yeah, especially because I don't I don't think we expected it. I didn't really expect it to cook at all. I kind of thought the Sims were wrong and like my buddy Elliott is like so good at aerothermal stuff. But even looking at the numbers that he came up with, I was like, there's just no way. Like it's not, there's no way this works.

and I was kind of even even though the rocket came back and I was happy about that I was still really worried in my mind that we weren't going to be able to put together a good video about it because it wasn't going to have a satisfying payoff of like the meat cooked and there's like one

shot if you go from the right angle where it kind of looks like the meat got a little bit brown. I saw it. And it's like great, that's all we need. Let me ask you a question. Did you let Right when you got to the rocket, did you open it? Yeah, we, I think we, like, looked at it for two or three minutes just to make sure all the pieces were there and, like, did anything significant break?

But then, yeah, it was pretty much right away. We did have someone with a timer on their phone to be like, here's when the meat will spoil. You were, like, really USDA specific about this. Yeah, and people get angry in the comments, too. They're like, don't you know you can use? It's like, whatever, man. It's like a YouTube video. It's just government lies, man.

You eat it whatever you want. Just like, don't you know what storytelling is? No, here's my, here's my logistical question is, did you test the temperature of the, it was like copper, right? The nose, nose cone. Did you test, had that dissipated all of its heat by the time you got there? Oh, yeah. No, that was long gone. Okay.

I didn't know how long it holds on to it because I was like, could you have let it cook? Like, was there not, you know, could it have stayed hot? and kind of like long tail cooked. It's copper, man. That's the whole point. I know. I guess they're quick and then it goes fast. Yeah.

Maybe you should have done two things. It should have been copper to a slower cooling metal that the meat cooked on. The problem is really that all the heat, as soon as you get subsonic and you stop doing the compression heating, you're basically in a wind tunnel. And so the heat is all wick away again once it stops doing the compression heating. And so it really, it stayed above that, you know, however many temperature Celsius Fahrenheit. It stayed above the USDA like minimum safe temperature for only about 20 seconds.

And then you can see it, it just drops so steeply off. And it actually gets colder at altitude than it was on the ground because there's like, you know, it's just colder up there. We did have a question in the chat from Pat, which was, could you cook the meat on the GoPro instead? have you considered you definitely could those GoPros get like too hot hot to the point where you cannot

hold them you could totally do it little pre-burner you know mm-hmm pretty good yeah 100% yeah I mean successful though

like all around you did the thing this has been your mission accomplished right mission accomplished and I don't think I think I'm doing it again. I'm actually going to probably fly the booster one or two more times

just to get like a little bit more experience this fall. But one thing that like doesn't get shown a lot in the video is just how complicated and like Rube Goldberg-esque the whole upper avionic stack is to get it to like getting that to fit in the nose cone with all the wires not pinching each other and with all of the telemetry intent is like clear so that they can like beam out telemetry that is a crazy setup inside the nose cone and it it really sucked to work with so I'm not doing that again yeah how long does it take to put a rocket like that together because like it's you're just doing it by hand so it feels like it's not a super scalable process um if you're talking about building it from scratch I started the build in

I think late September. Call it October 1st. And it flew it flew December 7th or something. So it was like two months. And that was like two months of work almost every day. So it was pretty consistent.

In terms of once the rocket's once the rocket exists and all the pieces are there, putting it together, like integrating it to get ready to fly, that was probably like three days. because it's like most of that stuff exists already. The big stuff is assembling the motor, because the motor ships in pieces for safety reasons. And yeah, like most of the stuff is just stuff that doesn't do really well on video either.

It's like, oh, this tube is 0.1 millimeters too big. We need to like sand for an hour to make it the right size. And that stuff gets boring pretty quick. Yeah. The truth about any amateur rocketry is that it's all sanding. I do have a question about how this changes your perspective on the industry. Does it make you more or less excited about in-space manufacturing? I was going to ask, is the food industry or the space industry?

Any of them? Ship this up, produce the thing, bring it back, you know? I didn't understand what the in-space manufacturing companies like Barta and the other ones are doing until I like until the whole life cycle had happened where they like sent a capsule up and then brought it back and had stuff inside. I'm a I'm a big fan of that. I think it's really cool. I don't know that it like longer heating durations. You can maybe do drop shipped stakes. I'm telling you someone one of those company has a great opportunity to put just like a little bit of pizza on there or like just just for the bit it would get so much good PR um this is not going to end up at a space company director of frozen

in space and then cooked in reentry yeah this is the thing de jrno hit them up you know it's the same thing about the cameras it's the same thing about the cameras on starship we're like all you guys need to do is take like three or four interns and give them a fun summer job of like figure out how we do this. It'll cost you, you know, their salary for a few months. And it's totally worth it. In terms of a ROI on like the PR that you'd get, cook a pizza on reentry, do it. I mean, they can't deploy the bailouts. You might as all keep it internal and see what happens.

Yeah. I don't know if you've been falling along though, Joe. They're having, they've got some big priorities. They got to go on first. So those interns might be busy. Are we, wait, am I out of the loop? What are the big priority? But we're going to cook a pizza also this time.

They need to not blow up, is what I'm trying to say. Yeah. Oh, SpaceX. Guys, I'm on the prize, right? So, yeah. Speaking of which, I'm pretty sure the last time that you were on the show, maybe two times ago, was immediately after the Astro Power Slide. I think that's true in my brain canon.

And so I'm not saying that every time you get booked for this show, show, a hilarious rocket fail happens. But it sure does seem like every time we get booked for this show, a hilarious rocket fail happens. And I'm wondering if we can break down the Gilmore space failure real quick, because, I mean, early entry into the off nominees for sure, mid entry, I guess we're late in the year. This is a classic. If you, you know that sound that's like, you know, if I had a nickel for every time a rocket reached 1.0 TWR and then slid to the side, I'd have two nickels, which isn't a lot, but it's more than you think.

Yeah, for sure. But this one, propulsive landing didn't barely blew up. Yeah, pretty sick. I gotta hand it to a hybrid rocket motor for not blowing up when you slam it into the ground. It's my favorite hybrid motor, for sure.

I hate those. Curious what your take is on hybrid motors. Yeah, I'm not a big fan. No, I'm not. I have some beef. I actually, I met someone like two or three weeks ago at this convention that I went to. And they were like, oh, I'm so sorry.

I am building a hybrid. And I was like, oh, no. Like, my beef with hybrids is almost entirely a joke. And I made someone feel actually bad that they were doing hybrids. So to be clear, whatever way you get to space is fine. But on principle, I do kind of think they're the wrong way to solve the problem. It says solid rocket motor man over here. I don't even like solids.

I just got too far down the rabbit hole and now I can't stop. It's the ones you can buy. Yeah. I don't know if they just sell liquid rockets. They don't sell amateur RP1 rockets, do they? I don't think that's a thing. No, but there is a lot of, there's a lot of cool stuff going on in like amateur liquid rocketry.

That is like really niche in the community. But it's also a lot of like alcohol stuff. like that would be yeah yeah um nitrous IPA um got a good market check you can maybe sell some of the stuff you've been making down there yeah yeah this is available if anybody wants to make a rock ship it up there's a if anyone wants to see uh some of this stuff too that the my favorite is these guys they call themselves half cat rocketry and they're based the the logo is based off of a meme of a cat with two legs but they have tested so many combinations of propellant they have one they call garfield gorge where they just

add a bunch of orange additive into the fuel. And they're all liquid rockets. They're all like home-built liquid rockets. There's a great photo that's definitely not going to be on the website, but they've used WD40 as a fuel before. And there's this great photo that I have of them. They're standing next to the rocket. This thing's, you know, as tall as them.

The top part of the tank is open, and they've just got a gallon of WD-40 that they're dumping into the rocket. Slide right through the atmosphere. And it burns fine. Yeah. Yeah, they're great. I didn't never knew about this area of the world. No.

That's crazy. Yeah. All right. Can I have to go down a rabbit hole. Yeah, that's a whole new section of the internet that we're going to get into tonight. Thanks for a rabbit hole. Shout out, just going back a little bit, shout out to Gilmore Space for releasing that video. That's like, it's such a baller move to have a failure in being, be like, here it is.

Hold on. Hold on. Pump the brakes. Pump the brakes, Joey. Uh-oh. All right. Do you remember what happened to this rocket shortly before the last time they were going to launch? Uh, yes, I do.

Would you like me to say it for the chat? I would, yes. Um, as I recall, something happened. I'm not sure that we ever learned what it is. Maybe you guys know, but something happened, which caused the faring to deploy on the pad, which is so funny. Um, and I don't think. think we got video of that.

But we have it on very good authority. This is our beat that this video exists. The intention is for it to be public. I think we have somebody in the chat that works there. So we are pleading with everybody to hold this video and unveil it on the off nominee show at the end of this year. And we'll do a public premiere of the faring video on this show because it might be a better failure than the launch.

What can we offer? What can we do to sweeten the deal? I'll send you so much free merch. I'll send a bottle of this. Send the propellant for the amateur rockets. I'll buy you a ton of fridge cigarettes, a bunch of Diet Coke. Steak?

Sure. $100 a pound steak? I'll buy that. You can have a, I have a bunch of aprons that say whatever happens, we're eating it. I'll send you one of those. That is great merch. Yeah, whatever you want to sweeten the deal.

I would love that footage. You thought you were running a flight computer e-commerce shop. You should be running an apparel shop over there with those aprons. Cooking accessories, yeah. I'll legitimately buy one from you if you still have them and you don't want them in your house. That's such a good idea. We should have done that. Maybe I can do it in a month or two.

Yeah. Yeah. There you go. So yeah, that venue exists. They have not been bold enough to post it yet, is my point. Be bold. Do it. Do it.

Released it, you coward. I still think the, what was the, who was it that launched in Norway? Esar. Esar. Most picturesque launch failure that's ever been, I feel like. Beautiful. Yeah, beautiful failure. I will say, you know, maybe this is actually just a downside of hybrid motors.

If you're going to crash your rocket into the ground, it's not like you're going to need to pick up the pieces and reuse them. Your rocket should explode. I think when a rocket hits the ground, canonically it should explode. And the hybrid doesn't really let that happen. And Esar, if you see that, it's like a drone shot above the water when it hits the water. And you can see, you can see the shockwave.

Yeah, it's gorgeous. Yeah. It's unbelievable. Absolutely wild. Look at this. Like this isn't even planet Earth, man. Incredible. This is.

We should do a David Attenborough narration of this. Maybe we'll get him for the off nominees. There you go. There we go. This is, oh my God. Yeah. Incredible video. Just gorgeous.

Deserves. Yeah, I mean, that's just, yeah. It's going to be a tough year, Jake. It always is. This is the thing with this stupid show is it's always a tough year. Some years we don't realize it. No, some years we don't realize it. We're like, it did a lot happen this year?

And then we make the list. But this year, we know it. As it happens, we're like, oh, shit. This year, it was last year that that static fire in China became a launch, right? Okay, it doesn't count for this year. Because that's, like, such a classic. Did that win? I think that was...

That did win, yeah. I'm pulling up the site here. So that won. We had a lot of funny moonlanders. We had some good spaceships. And then, yeah, that one was the best. I mean, that's just incredible. Yeah.

It's hard to beat that. Yeah, the time that Avio threw out the missing tanks in their trash can. That was the former year before that. That was a controversial winner. We got emails about that one. Yeah. Shout out Avio, Avio, whatever. What else is next?

So you got the space shot that's obviously this is building up to. Yeah, now we've got to bug you about the space shop for the next three years every time you get back on the show. Yeah. I need some motivation to do it. I actually don't. I just self-motivine on that one. nine of the morning and get to work and do it. I just need, you know, I need someone to like be staring at me disapprovingly if I start work

at 10, you know? I don't need someone to say it, but just to look at me with like a kind of, you're starting that late. Yeah, no, the space shots. It's expected. Come on. I don't know. LA's a mess.

But, yeah, the space shot is coming up. There's a bunch of stuff that I want. to do in the meantime, like two years ago, oh my gosh, no, like three or four years ago, I said I was going to do a Starship model rocket. And then I did all the CAD and tabled it because I was like, I don't have time for this, which is crazy. It's a rocket. I have time for it.

And I think I might want to try that again as Starship, you know. That's like a whole rework at this point. The V1 ship doesn't exist anymore. You got to have a manual explosion button for accuracy. As long as it doesn't make it to SICO. Yeah, I think a Star Ship model will be really fun. No promises on that. But then, yeah, we're going to fly the high stakes booster a couple more times.

That's this fall. Then next year, we're going to build the second stage for the space shot. It's eight inches on diameter. It's going to be like 12, 15 feet tall just as the second stage. and it is a monster. You need a couple people to move around. Yeah, we ran into, I fired a, I wonder, I don't think I have like a full video published of it yet,

but I fired the space shot rocket motor like as a static fire about a month ago. And it worked great, which is really cool. But it presented a lot of unique problems, which is you don't, you don't, once it's in the CAD, is really easy to turn it around and look at different parts and move it. And once it's in real life and it weighs 170 pounds loaded, you can't just like pick it up and put it in the car. It's like you get the shop crane and you get the jackstand and then you have to like go

back and forth and lift it up. And it's you start to run into the problems of like, this is too big for a person to move. And those are things that are really hard to anticipate until you're like looking directly at it, like, shit, what do I do about this? You've just given like blanket validation for all of the, what do they call it, the structural test articles that they're always making and just moving around on the cranes at the launchback.

People make so much fun. And it was like, oh, Blue Origin can't do anything, but just make a big wooden thing and move around. And I've been saying that. I'm like, dude, that's probably super important to just like practice moving those things on a crane because they're big. I think everyone at Starbase is nodding along right now. Now it's being like, yes, yes, it's very hard to work with these giant things.

Yeah. And it's you just, you really, as much as you can be good at planning, most of the time, you just aren't going to be able to anticipate that stuff until it's like right in front of you. And it turns out like, it's actually really hard to get these two tubes to fit together or whatever. So yeah, working on the space shot stuff and hopefully going to fly to like halfway to space next year. And then if everything goes really well, we'll try to do space shot late next year.

But I think that's like you guys are very familiar with the phrase green lights to Malibu. Oh, yeah. Right. That's like green lights and nitrous in the tank to Malibu. Right. All I see is that you're just starting your new tradition of saying the space shot is just a few months away on the show. And then we'll have you back in a year. I'll be back in a year. And you'd be like, well, it's just around the corner. And then, yeah. It's okay by me. You can come back as much as you want and tell us you're still working on it.

The longer it takes, the more you have to come on the show. So that's good. Yeah, exactly. I like doing this. This is fun. I'll have to get, I'll have to get that ranch soda next time. If you pick one out,

let me know. So that doesn't spoil. A few more fridge sigs and then, uh, heck yeah. We'll find out if Jake, well, thank you guys from the mead.

Then maybe you could be the new cohoots. Yeah. And in a year, because I'm not going to, open another one of these for a while, but in a year, I'll open the second bottle and we'll see if it's gotten any better. Can Joe come on every Mead show this time in year? I'd like that. Let's do that. Yeah, let's do it. I mean, it's going to start ramping up now because like this is, this has now been a year since I started. So like in a few weeks, I've got the second batch that's going to be

of age to year, you know. So it's going to start accelerating a lot now. Yeah, yeah. I'm looking forward to it. Well, yeah, thank you guys for having me on. I love doing this stuff. I'll be back whenever you want. Always the best. Everybody watch the video. beef. Thank you. We have anything else to plug, Jake, just the Discord. Love your beef. Off non-backcom slash Discord.

Yep. That's it. Five bucks a month. You can hang out with us. It's always fun. You should go support these guys. You should go watch the Meat Rocket video and then go support them. Mm-hmm.

Just keep going back and forth. Yeah. All right, y'all. Glad we did the show this week. Thank you, Starlink. You're the best. Thank you, Starlink for working. Bye.

Bye. Bye. Bye. All right. See you guys. One, two, three.