What's weird about student/amateur rocketry is how, at a certain point, knowledgeable people have to say "I'm not allowed to help you." If you get too good at this hobby you run straight into arms treaties.
I can't wait until arms export controls are challenged under first amendment grounds, we already came close that one time with encryption algorithms being published as a book
If college kids can do it, there's no knowledge that terrorists in even backwater shitholes (a lot of al-qaeda were engineers by training) can't quickly obtain. We might as well drop the pretense that the knowledge itself is something so valuable to building weapons that speaking it to foreigners should be illegal
I don't think this is an accurate statement. Consider for instance that the Sinaloa Cartel is currently hiring college students to try and reproduce chemical precursors for the production of Fentanyl. This is something that's probably trivial for a real company with resources to do, but because it's not public knowledge it's difficult for them.
I think the same could likely be said for this kind of production of rocketry.
For another example, consider how Russia had to rely on Iran for the production of their Shahed drones (until Iran showed them how to produce them), despite Russia being a longtime producer of weaponry.
I think this particular engineering department has a very exceptional group of college kids. I don't hear much about students in other schools in other states much less other countries accomplishing near this much. I know "American Exceptionalism" probably is not a view that HN audience would give much merit to, but we are still one of the only places in the world where smart students are given opportunities like this. Our culture seemed to give "opportunity" a good balance (even when we see the many downfalls, ie the entire crypto space)
I find your choice of words interesting. "Students are given opportunities" sounds pretty much the way things were done in the USSR. The Western way is (or at least used to be) treating students as adults who have the independence and the agency to create opportunities for themselves.
Iran/China/Russia all have more advanced missiles than the US has deployed like, ever. Iran and Russia have demonstrated recently hypersonics that are effectively unblockable.
What kind of knowledge do these arms export controls really do other than make it more difficult to compete with defense contractors?
> Iran/China/Russia all have more advanced missiles than the US has deployed like, ever.
This is somewhat true for China's, on paper at least. Maybe.
Russia's Kinzhals got intercepted by 1980s Patriots.
Iran's are just boring old ballistic missiles.
> Iran and Russia have demonstrated recently hypersonics that are effectively unblockable.
The US has plenty of similar ballistic missiles; ATACMS is similarly tough to intercept. Doubly so in large numbers, which was how Iran got some through.
Fortunately, the economics of the marketplace have driven it towards big gene-printing firms. It's cheaper to outsource to a high-capital, low-cost-operating company than it is to do in house with a low-capital, high-cost-operating approach. Thus the low end of the market pretty much died and the big guys check all orders against a slew of thou-shalt-not-print genes.
You don't need to print really, more a question of culturing them like a kombucha. Luckily that ends up being a self limiting problem since the amateur doesn't know containment well enough to protect themselves.
I don't think it's that strained. BPS Space for example spends a lot of time talking about how "This is not a tutorial" but there's a massive gulf between what is currently published information that is available to people like him and what is actually meaningful to regulation.
If you are buying your propellant components in small bags off the internet and mixing it yourself in stand mixers and casting it yourself in your garage and using niche open market servos to build your stuff with homemade guidance, the gov is not looking at you. ITAR isn't about keeping every precocious kid from building small volume guided munitions; It's about keeping shithole states from building ICBMs. It's about keeping former SpaceX personnel from spending time in Best Korea.
This is especially true in a post FPV drone world, where putting 1kg of explosive anywhere you want in a 10km radius is a $500 purchase off alibaba. Precision munitions have accidentally been democratized.
I'm not sure that's an accurate characterization. He's specifically voiced concerns about the ambiguity of whether what he's doing violates ITAR, even with the "this isn't a tutorial, I've left out information" and that if the feds launched an investigation, he'd be crushed by the process even if they found no wrongdoing in the end.
Yet anyone can buy a consumer drone and strap homemade explosives on it and do a lot more damage VS a college kid with an engineering background who is into rocketry.
