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BPS.Space’s Scout F achieved a controlled propulsive landing in 2022, descending under powered control and touching down on deployable legs rather than relying only on a parachute. Built by independent rocketry project leader Joe Barnard, Scout F combined thrust-vector control, custom avionics, guidance software, mechanically controlled thrust, and lightweight landing hardware to solve a problem that is unusually difficult for a small solid-fuel rocket.
The achievement was reported by Hackaday on August 5, 2022, after approximately seven years of development. The original Scout F demonstration video shows the flight and landing.
What BPS.Space achieved
Scout F launched, climbed, transitioned into descent, and landed vertically under active control. That makes the flight substantially different from a conventional model-rocket recovery, in which a parachute slows the vehicle after the motor burns out.
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Scout F attempted to control its descent using propulsion, steer itself toward the landing area, deploy landing legs, and remain upright after touchdown. It was a model-scale engineering demonstration—not an orbital-class reusable booster and not a direct performance equivalent of a Falcon 9 first stage.
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The available reporting does not establish authoritative figures for the flight’s altitude, maximum speed, rocket mass, touchdown speed, landing accuracy, or motor impulse. Those numbers should not be inferred from the video.
Who is Joe Barnard and what is BPS.Space?
BPS.Space is Joe Barnard’s long-running experimental rocketry project. Its work has focused on active stabilization, thrust-vector control, custom flight computers, guidance software, telemetry, and eventually reusable or space-capable vehicles.
The project developed through successive rockets, avionics systems, and landing attempts. That iterative approach matters: the Scout F landing was the result of solving many smaller problems in sensing, mechanics, control, propulsion, and recovery rather than simply adding landing legs to an ordinary model rocket.
Why landing a solid-fuel rocket is so difficult
A conventional solid rocket motor contains a preloaded propellant grain. Once ignited, the motor generally burns according to its grain geometry and operating conditions. Unlike a typical liquid engine, it does not have a simple propellant-flow valve that can be opened or closed to vary thrust in real time.
That creates a difficult landing problem. A powered descent requires the vehicle to control its vertical speed and attitude during the final seconds of flight. A motor that ignites slightly early, burns more strongly than expected, or provides thrust for too long can cause the rocket to rise again, drift, land hard, or tip over. An ignition that is late or weak can leave too much downward velocity for the landing legs to absorb.
The system also has to cope with sensor noise, ignition delay, changing vehicle mass, structural flex, actuator limits, and horizontal motion. Landing successfully requires more than reaching the correct location: the rocket must arrive with an acceptable attitude, low enough vertical velocity, and little sideways velocity.
How Scout F steered itself
Thrust-vector control
Scout F used thrust-vector control, or TVC. Its motor mount could pivot so that the thrust line moved relative to the rocket’s center of mass. When the thrust line is tilted, it creates a torque that changes the rocket’s attitude.
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The flight computer used sensor measurements to determine how the vehicle was moving and commanded the mount to make corrective adjustments. TVC is not the same as turning an aircraft with aerodynamic control surfaces. It changes the direction of engine thrust, allowing the rocket to control its pitch and yaw while powered.
Earlier BPS.Space motor mounts were 3D-printed. The Scout F mount used machined aluminum to reduce flex and mechanical play. That change is important because a control system can issue the correct command and still perform poorly if the mechanism bends, vibrates, or has too much backlash.
The control loop
The landing system can be understood as a closed loop:
- Sensors measure acceleration, rotation, altitude, position, and other flight data.
- State estimation combines those measurements into an estimate of attitude, velocity, and position.
- Guidance determines the desired path and landing conditions.
- Control software compares the desired state with the measured state.
- Actuators move the TVC mount and thrust-control hardware to reduce the error.
This process repeats throughout the flight. Any weakness in the chain—poor GPS reception, an incorrect filter estimate, flex in the motor mount, or a slow actuator—can become a landing failure.
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The most unusual part of the system was its method of controlling effective thrust. BPS.Space used a pair of ceramic pincers or thrust blockers that could obstruct the motor exhaust and reduce the thrust transmitted to the vehicle.
This distinction is important:
- True throttling changes combustion conditions or propellant flow inside an engine.
- Effective thrust control leaves the solid motor burning but mechanically limits or redirects how much of its thrust reaches the vehicle.
Scout F used the second approach. Calling this a “throttled solid rocket motor” can be misleading if it suggests that the propellant itself was being throttled like a liquid engine. The motor continued to burn; the moving hardware controlled the useful thrust mechanically.
That solution introduced its own engineering challenges. The blockers had to operate near hot, high-speed exhaust, survive erosion and heat, move reliably, and avoid creating unacceptable asymmetry or vibration. They also added mass and moving parts. It was a specialized model-scale technique, not a universal way to make solid rockets throttle like liquid engines.
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The flight computer and avionics
BPS.Space developed custom avionics to provide the real-time sensing and control required for active flight. The broader AVA, or All Vehicle Avionics, project was described in 2020 as using multiple microcontrollers, inertial sensors, GPS, a barometer, telemetry hardware, and a main processor for real-time operations. It was identified at the time as the twelfth flight computer Barnard had built.
These systems provide several different functions:
- Inertial sensors detect acceleration and rotation quickly.
- GPS supplies position and velocity information, although it can be noisy, delayed, or interrupted.
- A barometer can help estimate altitude from atmospheric pressure.
- Sensor-fusion software combines imperfect measurements into a more useful estimate of the vehicle’s state.
- Telemetry sends information to the ground, while onboard logging preserves data for post-flight analysis.
- Control software commands the TVC system, thrust blockers, landing hardware, and recovery functions.
The available coverage establishes AVA as part of BPS.Space’s avionics development, but it does not prove that every AVA component or configuration was identical to the final Scout F landing vehicle.
Landing legs, deployment, and the backup parachute
Scout F’s landing hardware used lightweight carbon-fiber rods held by a rubber-band retention arrangement. Nichrome wire melted the retaining element, allowing spring tension to deploy the legs.
The leg design had to do more than unfold. It needed to absorb impact without bouncing the rocket back into the air or allowing it to tip over. The rocket therefore had to reach the landing area with sufficiently low vertical and horizontal velocity, deploy the legs at the right time, and contact the ground with a stable geometry.
BPS.Space also included an emergency parachute that could be triggered manually or by the flight computer if a powered landing was judged infeasible. That kind of abort path is valuable because a closed-loop landing system needs a way to recover when its state estimate, trajectory, or remaining control authority falls outside safe limits.
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The successful Scout F flight followed earlier attempts and design revisions. A Scout E flight in 2020 came close to a controlled landing but tipped over after touchdown because it still had too much horizontal movement.
Coverage of that failure associated it with weak GPS reception caused by antenna placement and a possible issue in the Kalman-filter-based sensor-fusion system. In practical terms, the rocket may have been unable to estimate its position and motion accurately enough to cancel the sideways velocity before landing.
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That failure illustrates why a landing cannot be judged only by the moment the vehicle reaches the ground. A rocket can appear to be over the pad and still fail because it is sliding sideways, rotating, bouncing, or touching down before its legs are ready. Detailed telemetry and onboard logging allowed BPS.Space to diagnose the result and guide later hardware and software changes.
Was it the first model rocket to land propulsively?
Hackaday described BPS.Space as holding a unique distinction in high-power rocketry: the first project reported there to propulsively land a solid-fueled model rocket.
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That claim should not automatically be expanded into an absolute “first ever” statement. The answer depends on how “model rocket,” “solid-fuel rocket,” “autonomous landing,” and “successful recovery” are defined, and whether all comparable projects have been surveyed. The careful description is that Scout F was a notable reported demonstration of a propulsive landing by a solid-fuel model rocket.
What the achievement did—and did not—prove
What it demonstrated
- A small solid-fuel rocket can be guided during powered flight using TVC.
- Effective descent thrust can be controlled mechanically without conventionally throttling the solid motor.
- Custom avionics can close the loop between sensing, state estimation, guidance, and actuation.
- A lightweight landing system can deploy and support a vertical recovery.
- Repeated testing and failure analysis can make a complex model-scale flight reliable enough to land.
What it did not demonstrate
- It did not show that ordinary solid rocket motors can be throttled in the same way as liquid engines.
- It did not establish orbital-class reusability or performance comparable to a commercial launch vehicle.
- It did not prove that the same thrust-blocking hardware scales directly to much larger rockets.
- It did not provide, in the cited reporting, a complete quantitative flight-data set.
Solid motors remain attractive because they are compact and mechanically simpler than liquid propulsion systems. But their limited in-flight control, ignition behavior, exhaust-management problems, and need for specialized hardware make powered recovery particularly demanding.
What came next for BPS.Space
The 2022 coverage mentioned further BPS.Space ambitions, including a functional scale model of a belly-flopping Starship-style vehicle, additional experimental rockets, and a larger project intended to exceed 100 kilometers in altitude.
Later Hackaday coverage described Avalanche as a test platform for systems relevant to a future Kármán-line attempt, including guidance, a spin-stabilized camera system, and descent hardware. These should be treated as development objectives and test programs, not as evidence that every later milestone had already been completed.
The bottom line
Scout F’s importance lies in the complete engineering system, not in one trick. BPS.Space had to make a small solid-fuel rocket sense its motion, estimate its state, steer with a rigid TVC mechanism, reduce effective thrust using ceramic exhaust blockers, deploy landing legs, and retain a parachute fallback when the powered landing became unsafe.
That combination made BPS.Space’s 2022 flight a genuine model-scale demonstration of controlled propulsive recovery. It was inspired by the same broad idea as modern reusable boosters—launch, guide, slow down, and land vertically—but it used a very different propulsion architecture and should be understood on its own engineering terms.
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