OG: Approved - BPS.space
Featuring the Next Generation of Storytellers Rising from the Creator Economy
Welcome to OG: Approved—where rule-breaking creators shape the future. Hand-picked by Open Gardens, they’re not following the playbook—they’re writing the next one.
Name: BPS.space
Instagram: 181K Followers
Youtube: 794K Followers
Tik Tok: 217.4K Followers
Who Is BPS.space?
BPS.space is one person building a space program from a desk. Joe Barnard designs, machines, wires, codes, and flies model rockets that steer and stabilize themselves in the air. He treats YouTube like mission control and his audience like the ground crew. BPS.space is a crowdfunded space program in the literal sense. Patreon, kit sales, merch, and a stubborn loop of build, test, crash and try again pay for the next launch.
It starts with a question that should be impossible. Can one person land a rocket the way SpaceX does, at model scale, with hobby parts and a small workshop? Joe teaches himself control theory. He learns CAD, soldering, embedded code, and composite layups because he has to. Early videos show shaky test stands and gimbal rigs. Servos chatter. Airframes tip over. He keeps all of it in the edit. Failure lives on camera so the lessons do too.
The breakthrough is thrust vector control. A tiny computer reads sensors hundreds of times per second and moves the engine mount to keep the rocket upright. That computer becomes a product other people can buy. The gimbal becomes a kit. The wiring harness becomes a diagram you can follow. What begins as a personal experiment turns into a set of tools and docs that help a whole community fly smarter.
The content feels like engineering documentaries shot in a garage. Long YouTube episodes take you from design through flight with test cards, slow-mo, and flight data overlays. Instagram is the lab notebook. TikTok is the moment of truth. When a rocket flies clean, you see it from five angles. When it does not, you see what failed and why.
The crowdfunded part is the engine. Supporters do more than tip. They underwrite new avionics, a bigger airframe, a new idea for guidance. Preorders fund small production runs. Backers vote on what to try next. People who watched the early crashes now fly his boards in their own projects and send data back. It looks like a channel. It behaves like a program.
Start with an early control-system build where the gimbal finally holds attitude. Then a full flight video where guidance locks in and you feel the difference. Then a recent episode that shows a new board or airframe going from bench to sky. You will see how a one-person lab turns curiosity into hardware, and hardware into a community that keeps the next launch on the calendar.
Three Things We Like About BPS.space
R&D in public: Design. Test. Crash. Try again. The failures stay in the cut so the lessons land. Control theory is explained in plain language. You watch a garage lab turn into a guidance system that actually works.
A crowdfunded space program: Patreon, kit sales, and merch do more than support a channel. They fund the next board, the next airframe, the next launch. The audience acts like a ground crew, underwriting experiments and voting with preorders.
Tools that turn viewers into builders: Flight computers, gimbals, wiring, and clear docs move the work from one desk to a whole scene. People who learn from the videos fly the hardware themselves and send data back. The community is not just watching rockets. They are flying them.