r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/InsaneMocktail • Sep 08 '26

Video University of Waterloo Students Launch Rocket Breaking World Record

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136

u/Bookslayer10 Sep 08 '26

I've talked to people in Rocketry clubs, and one of the things they need to be careful of is to not add too much guidance to their rockets. Why, you may ask? Well, if you add guidance, the rocket turns into a missile, and then you have built a missile, and the government gets nervous about university students building missiles.

At least, when they build missiles for free, if they are getting paid to do it then it's fine.

33

u/SK_Ren Sep 08 '26 edited Sep 09 '26

I think it was when Veritasium was testing the rods from god myth Edit: I have been corrected, it was a different "lets drop things from high altitiudes" Egg Drop From Space video by Mark Rober and was trying to figure out how to get it to land in their desired zone for recovery and observation, they very quickly were confronted with the problem of what they were trying to add to their hypothetical weapon was guidance, which would make it an actual weapon.

9

u/The_Motarp Sep 09 '26

IIRC Mark Rober was wanting to do something for a video that involved dropping something from very high up, and when he got asking some people he knew how he should go about making it land in a small enough area that he could film it they had to explain that he wasn't really allowed to know how to do that, and he especially wasn't allowed to post the details of how to do it to YouTube. I think maybe the idea was to see how much you could cook a bit of steak with the friction of falling.

1

u/JohnHazardWandering Sep 09 '26

I think it was Mark Rober and BPS space. 

2

u/SK_Ren Sep 09 '26

That sounds more familiar now that I think about it. It was with the giant weather balloons right? I knew I had to be one of the two. the rods from God video was the first one that came to mind.

1

u/unclebandit Sep 09 '26

Making knowledge illegal is preposterous.

1

u/The_Motarp Sep 10 '26

That is a very simplistic take on a very complex subject. On some topics, mostly related to the more dangerous types of weapons, there are good reasons for the government to both classify information and to prevent people from doing the research needed to get the answers themselves. For instance, there is no reason a civilian would need to know how best to pack anthrax into bombs for optimal dispersion, or to know the proper way to run centrifuges for making weapons grade uranium. And they definitely shouldn't be allowed to do the work needed to recreate the classified material they aren't allowed to have on their own.

And there are types of knowledge that even governments shouldn't have. For instance, if someone did a bunch of horrific experiments and figured out how to use a combination of drugs, brain surgery, and implanted electrodes, to create perfectly brainwashed agents who would rather die than betray the people who make them, the best thing to do would be to destroy the knowledge needed to do the procedure, and heavily classify the fact that it was even possible.

1

u/technocraticTemplar Sep 09 '26

That's pretty funny to hear about when the end result of their "test" was basically them dropping lawn darts onto sand castles. It's like testing the effectiveness of artillery with a potato cannon, but even those can probably fire something faster than terminal velocity.

20

u/BraveBiscotti1394 Sep 09 '26

Yeah as soon as you put even an inertial guidance and navigation system that you can make from basic Arduino parts, along with control actuators that work with a PID controller, you have a proper guided missile.

Hell, even putting gps on the thing for guidance is very illegal.

2

u/hatedruglove Sep 09 '26

How did they locate and recover the camera then? I could be wrong but when you send something that high into the atmosphere and then it falls back down to earth it could be 100 miles away from were you made the first initial ignition.

6

u/WellThatsAwkwrd Sep 09 '26

A gps guidance system and a gps locator would likely fall into very different categories in the eyes of the government. Locator system would not receive info or be able to adjust trajectory, only transmit current location

1

u/sunburnd Sep 09 '26

It think that's mostly just youtube hype for clicks.

In fact the FAA process asks for thins like avionics, flight control, tracking, dynamic stability, planned impact area, and flight profile.

/edit fixing plant into planned... idk some days.

7

u/DaylightAdmin Sep 09 '26

The best example of that was as Mark Rober wanted to drop an egg from space. As he was talking to guys who knew how to solve that, they told him that he wanted them to tell him how to make a precision drop device, and that is a big nono for them.

1

u/drsoftware Sep 09 '26

Homing pigeon pilot