As part of a personal push to learn more about non-linear control, I have been playing around with a pretty powerful method known as trajectory optimization. Once the base code is set up, it’s fairly easy to go apply to various systems. Here’s a fun example of it being run on a drone: Drone performing flips! While waiting for Starship SN15 to launch (it was in fact scrubbed, sad), I decided to pull together an estimate for some of it’s dynamics and see if I could get my toy 2D simulation to perform that epic flip and land itself. To my excitement, after some finessing, it worked quite well. But what really surprised me was when I played the output side by side with actual landing footage: it lined up very very well. I wish I had gotten a live reaction of when this happened, I may or may not have jumped out of my chair. The whole program and optimization was written without any reference to the video or other explicit timing information.