How Dreamernaut works

Start here

A bootcamp runs in four stages, and each stage has its own tool.

Sign up and Check Your Rocket

Signing up

1. Open Join my Bootcamp and choose A student or A volunteer. A parent or guardian signs up a kid; students 18 and over sign up themselves. Kids 8 and up can join, and 6 and 7 year olds can join with a parent there to help them build.
2. Fill in the student, a parent or guardian and how to reach you, and pick a cohort or leave it to me. It takes about two minutes, and only I see it.
3. I call to confirm the spot, a private link with the paperwork for your cohort comes by email, and the rocket gets its code and a sticker.
4. Volunteers need no rocketry experience. I teach everything, and every volunteer passes a background check.

Your rocket's code

Every rocket gets a code that looks like DN-7K3QF. It is on the sticker on the rocket, in your email and at the end of Draw Your Rocket. It is the only thing you need to follow your rocket.

Checking your rocket

1. Open Check Your Rocket and type the code.
2. The page shows where the rocket is: drawn, built, on the launch board, which wave and pad, approved by the RSO, flown, and where it landed.
3. On launch day the page refreshes on its own every 30 seconds, so you can leave it open in the stands. If a refresh fails it says so and keeps trying.

Lost the code? Email [email protected] with the rocket's name and I will find it.

Draw Your Rocket

Kids draw any rocket they want. The page checks that the drawing has the two things every rocket needs, then sends it to me by email. Custom kits cut from the drawing are coming; until then every student builds the same kit.

1. Any shape. Read the two rules: give it a back end (fins, a tail, a wide bottom), and leave room for the flame at the very bottom.
2. Draw it. Draw with a finger, a pen or a mouse. Pick colors, and use the eraser, Undo or Clear when you need them.
3. Pick your flame. Each flame color is a real motor propellant. Sparky flames (Dark Matter, Metalstorm) only fly at fields that allow them.
4. Tell me about it. Name the rocket, add your first name, then press the button that opens an email to me with the drawing in it. Send that email; the page does not send anything by itself.

The fly check marks a drawing with a green check when it flies as drawn, and an orange question mark when I will make one small change, such as bigger bottom fins or a little weight in the nose, and tell you first.

Scout

Scout is the tool I use to decide where the bootcamp can launch. Pick a place and it checks that spot against the NAR and Tripoli safety codes, the FAA rules for rockets (14 CFR Part 101), the airspace, the ground around it and the weather. It needs an internet connection for the map and the live data.

Step by step

1. Your rocket. Pick the motor class (H to O) and, if you know it, the specific motor and the rocket's weight. Tick the airframe boxes that apply: fiberglass or metal parts, complex (staged or clustered), sparky motor. Search every motor opens the full list (AeroTech, Cesaroni and the rest) to find one by name, maker or propellant. For a cluster or two-stage rocket, type the impulse of all its motors added up. Set the pads per wave and whether a wave fires one at a time or all at once: three or more high-power rockets fired together add up their impulse, and everyone moves back to the distance for the total. Use the bootcamp rocket fills in the Journey 75 on its H motor.
2. Flight. Set the target altitude, the FAA ceiling you expect, and the descent rate under the parachute.
3. Launch day. Set the date. Scout then uses that day's hourly forecast (up to 16 days out) instead of the weather right now.
4. Pick a place. Search for it in the box at the top, pick one of the Dreamernaut sites, or click anywhere on the map. Scout checks the spot at once.
5. Field. Press Draw field, click the corners of the field on the map, then Finish. Scout works out the area and compares the field with the size the safety code asks for at your altitude.
6. Read the verdict, then save the site to keep it.

The verdict

The verdict has three rows.

• Site: the safety-code gates. A gate is pass or fail, never points. Airspace, buildings and roads inside the safety distance, a field that is too small.
• Conditions: the weather for the launch day, with hard stops (wind over 20 mph, low cloud, thunderstorms, poor visibility).
• Clearance: what is still needed on paper: the FAA waiver if the flight needs one, the landowner's written permission, a named RSO.

The verdict is a scouting score. The Range Safety Officer authorizes every launch on the day, under an FAA waiver when the flight needs one.

The cards under the verdict

Airspace

The airspace class at the spot with its real floor, special-use airspace, military training routes, temporary flight restrictions, the stadium rule and tall obstacles. It says which Part 101 rule applies, or that no waiver is needed.

Who to call

The air traffic facility that owns the airspace (the phone number is editable), the FAA service center for the waiver form, the National Weather Service office, and the military scheduling contacts.

Clear area

Occupied buildings and public roads inside 1,500 ft, power lines and railways, from OpenStreetMap. A building with no type is marked VERIFY and never counts as clear.

Field

Once the field is drawn: its area, its smallest side against the safety-code table at your ceiling, and the distance from the pad to the edge against the personnel distance.

Landowner

The parcel and property address at the pad and along the recovery line (Indiana statewide layer), with a link to the county assessor.

Weather

The launch day hour by hour, NWS alerts, cloud ceilings against your altitude, the best launch windows, sun angles, dryness and ten years of climate for that date.

Drift

Where the rocket comes down in the worst daylight hour, over a range of descent rates, with the Part 101.27 radius, and the hazards and parcels in the landing zone. Once Labs has five or more flights from a field with both a prediction and a measured landing, this card also says how the predictions there have compared.

Waiver

What triggers a waiver, a realistic ceiling to ask for, the 45-day legal minimum and the 60 to 90 days it usually takes, the window to call air traffic control, and a calendar reminder.

Clubs, logistics, cohort

The nearest NAR sections and Tripoli prefectures (every US prefecture and the ones abroad; some pins are only the region), plus food, fuel, the nearest hospital, parking, shelter and the bus checklist.

The map

• Viability heat map (on by default): every spot in the US colored by how viable it is for launching. Green is viable (75 to 100), orange to yellow is challenging (45 to 74), red is not viable, purple is restricted or prohibited military airspace. Hover (or tap on a phone) to see the score and the reasons for that spot. The colors come from FAA airspace and airport data, town populations and the land outline; the map cannot see buildings, roads or trees, so the full check on a click is still the answer.
• Range layout: the pads, the flight line and spectators at the personnel distance off to the side of the wind (crosswind), and the recovery arrow downwind. Spectators never stand upwind, where a rocket that turns into the wind comes down, or downwind, where the parachutes land.
• Sectional chart, Military routes and Obstacles (towers, stacks and wind turbines within about 2 miles) are overlays you can switch on.
• Basemap cycles between street, satellite and topo.

Saving, sharing and comparing

• Save site keeps the spot, the field outline and your setup in this browser. Open it again from Saved sites.
• Compare shows your saved sites side by side.
• Share link copies a link that opens Scout on the same spot and setup.
• Safety codes opens the NAR and Tripoli codes (Tripoli by section number) and the FAA rules Scout uses. Its Clubs tab has the Indiana clubs and the next club launches.
• Staff also see Site packet (a printable internal report with the waiver form answers, the landowner letter and the air traffic notification) and Make this the event's launch site, which sets the pad location Launch Control uses for landings and drift.

Labs

Labs keeps the record of every rocket that has flown, measures each flight against the prediction on its flight card, and turns that into data: a drag coefficient per airframe, descent rates, and how far rockets really drift at each field. The kids who build the rockets are credited on anything published from it.

Every rocket that has flown

This list fills itself from Launch Control. Each flight shows the rocket, its shape, its motor, the weather when it flew, its predicted and measured apogee, and where it landed (distance and direction from the pad, never an exact spot). Designers are shown as first name and last initial unless the family said yes to the full name.

The Lab Bench

The bench has five tabs.

Flight log

Your own log, kept in your browser. Press + Log a flight at the pad, add the altimeter file later at home, and the bench works out the apogee, the speeds, the descent rate and a fitted drag coefficient, and compares them with the prediction. Export CSV and Export JSON save it; Import JSON brings it back on another device. Load a simulated demo set fills it with practice data so you can see how it works.

Explorer

Charts across all flights: the median prediction error, the median absolute error and the median descent rate (the number Scout's drift card uses). Tick Include simulated rows to see the demo data too.

Contribute a flight

Anyone who flew a high-power rocket with an altimeter can add the flight to the open dataset. Fill in the rocket, the motor, the recorder, the date, place and weather (Pull current weather for this spot helps), how it flew and landed, and attach the unmodified altimeter CSV. Check my flight runs the same checks a bootcamp flight gets: the code, the physics, the file itself and duplicates. Then it goes to me for review. Contributions are released under CC BY 4.0 with your name.

Review queue

Staff only. Contributions arrive by email as files; import them here, and each one is re-checked and then accepted or rejected with a reason.

Payload request

To fly an experiment, pick the bay size (from 1.9 in and 60 g up to 3.8 in and 400 g), give the mass, size and number of flights, describe what it measures and how it is powered, and press Build the request to open an email to me. Payloads must be inert and sealed. The kid whose rocket carries it gets a copy of the data.

The program in numbers

Feet flown toward a million, the share of flights that failed next to NAR's 8.5% from its flight reports (with the kinds of failure), junior certifications earned, and how many kids went on to join Tripoli or NAR.

ARC trainer

For the American Rocketry Challenge: put in the liftoff mass, an F-or-smaller motor, the tube size, the drag coefficient and the descent rate, and see the predicted apogee, the flight time and the score against 800 ft and 37 to 40 seconds.

How Labs feeds the other tools

• Launch Control reads the fitted drag coefficient for the Journey 75, so every card's predicted apogee gets better as flights add up.
• Scout reads the measured descent rate and drift at each field.
• Each flight card's Labs panel shows predicted against measured apogee and drift for that rocket.

Mass Logistics Scaler

Set a mass, a height and a distance and it picks the smallest vehicle that can do the move, from a person carrying it to a heavy-lift rocket, with the cost, the time (including the wait for the machine) and the carbon.

Step by step

1. Tap a number in the big sentence at the top ("Move 10,000 lb up 200 ft and 0 ft across") and type over it. Units work: "2 tons", "900 kg", "40 mi", "30 m". Enter sets it, Escape cancels. The sliders below do the same.
2. Or start from one of the four pictures under Try one. A picture starts fresh.
3. For a trip between real places, open From where to where?, click the start and the end on the map (or search), and the road distance fills in. Add a stop adds a leg. If no road connects the places, Between A and B switches to Either on its own.
4. Everything else is under More about this move: load size, whether the height is up in the air or higher ground, one piece or split, land or water, road access, what to optimize for, driverless only, where in the world, the legs, what the load is (liquid, bulk, people, fragile, cold, hazardous), a deadline and budget, a steady flow, and the planet. Whatever you change there shows as a chip under the headline; tap a chip to go to it, or its x to undo it.
5. The answer card shows the pick, how much of its capacity, height and reach the move uses, and the job plan. On a phone a bar at the bottom keeps the pick in view as you scroll.

The tabs under the answer

• Other options: the top five vehicles that can do it, with Show all, and why the others cannot.
• Charts: the map of the winning vehicle for every mass and height, speed against height, and cost against time, plus Why not this vehicle.
• Save and share: name and save a plan, compare two plans, download a CSV, print the plan or copy a link to it.
• How it works: how it picks a vehicle, and every source.

Launch Control's summary links here with the launch-day load filled in.

Learn

Learn is for after the bootcamp: a 15-question practice quiz, a club finder by ZIP code with the next club launches and the national events, and the American Rocketry Challenge.

On every page

• Light and dark. The sun and moon button in the menu switches every page, including the tools, and remembers your choice on this device.
• Search. The magnifier in the menu (or Ctrl K, or the / key) searches every public page.
• Phones. Every tool works on a phone. Sheets and cards open full screen with Close at the top, and the flight card has a round close button at the top right.
• Saved in this browser. Scout's saved sites, the Lab Bench log and Logistics plans live in the browser you used. Export them to move them to another device.

Staff tools

Build Day, Launch Control and People run the bootcamp itself. Their guide opens with the same staff passphrase as the tools.

Help

Something not working, or a step this guide does not cover? Email [email protected] with the page, what you pressed and what happened. A screenshot helps.