This Scale-Model SpaceX Starship Handles Autonomous Flights — Under Teensy 4.0 Control

Pseudonymous maker "yo90bosses" is heading to the stars — or at least off the ground — with an autonomous model of the SpaceX Starship — a drone, but with a very familiar silhouette.

"This has been a multi-year project of mine," yo90bosses explains of the model. "It's a fully functional and 3D-printed autonomous [SpaceX] Starship model that uses cheap sensors and servos. Everything from task scheduling, sensor communication, sensor data fusion, control algorithms, data link, etc. was custom designed and implemented and runs on Arduino."

SpaceX began the development of Starship, a super heavy-lift vehicle that targets a 440,000lb payload and a crew capacity of up to 100, back in 2012, celebrating its first successful flight test — under the name Starhopper — in 2019. Subsequent testing of refined designs saw a Starship become the heaviest object to pass the Kármán line into space — before the ship exploded, ending the mission with a literal bang.

The model made by yo90bosses is as unlikely to explode as it is to reach the Kármán line. The 3D-printed chassis, designed to mimic the silhouette of the real Starship in miniature, sits atop a pair of counter-rotating propellers to provide thrust in place of a rocket engine. Like Starship, it can take off vertically, hover, and land — all under the supervision of a custom flight control system with autonomous navigation capabilities.

The electronics package is based on a Teensy 4.0 microcontroller board connected to a TDK InvenSense MPU-9250 nine-axis inertial measurement unit (IMU), a Bosch Sensortec BME280 temperature, humidity, and barometric pressure sensor, a u-blox SAM-M8Q Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) receiver, and a Semtech SX1280 LoRa transceiver as a downlink to land, plus a few 9g hobby servos and electronic speed controllers. "[That's] all that's needed to get this done," its creator says. "Please don't unless you hate urself."

More information on the project is available in yo90bosses' Reddit post; the maker has indicated that schematics and source code may be shared in the future, but that "it's a ton of work" to build and is "probably not doable without a lot of experience."