The Shop
Welcome to the Impulse launch Systems resource pages. Here you will find rocketry related resources and specific information about our company and our products. Everyone loves to talk about the latest rocket kits and many talk about new rocket motors, but no one talks about launch controllers. This makes marketing to rocketeers somewhat difficult. We do buy print advertising in a few publications. Beyond this, it seems to be a matter of showing up at national events, displaying our products and talking to people. Even then, some rocketeers will look me in the eye and say that they don't care at all about launch equipment; the club takes care of that.
Small business is often said to be the backbone of the U.S. economy. When we set about securing licensing and insurance we learned that most online services designed to help are not oriented toward manufacturing at all. At all. I would choose the business class "other" and type in manufacturer and get nothing. Requests for a custom quote resulted in no greater a response than "we are evaluating your request" followed by silence. I solicited our homeowners insurance agent and she apparently tried but came up with nothing. Finally I emailed the insurance agent for the NAR and he got right back to me with short list of business insurance providers here in Las Cruces. It took a few weeks of back and forth and filling out numerous forms to secure basic liability insurance, but we did it and we feel better prepared as a result.
So we manufacture our launch system offerings here at our home in New Mexico. Figuring out how to fabricate one of something can be a challenge, but figuring out how to produce lots of the same thing is another animal. The spool with a controller built into it is an idea I had been toying with for over a decade. When I started evaluating how we might do this I looked at off-the-shelf extension cord winding spools. Ultimately I had to figure out a way to produce our own spool element in order to fit the electrical components in a manner that would allow access to replace worn out or damaged components. The trail of discarded prototype parts and assemblies caused Gloria more than a little trepidation along the way. Early in the process, my son Arthur, who saw me working in the shop and was keeping an eye on our progress, decided to get us a small CNC machine for Christmas in 2019. Suddenly my worries about how I could possibly fashion a consistently cut ethernet port mount evaporated. Arthur's insight served us well for the first 18 months of production. That being said, it just about shook itself apart regularly while cutting our polyvinyl chloride stock. Our X-Carve Pro machine, one of the first delivered by Inventables, is able to produce about 80% of all of the cutting needed to produce our controllers. On the other hand, this machine is pushing the limits of what we can do in our garage workshop in terms of noise, power consumption, and chip collection.
I guess this is a clear case of "be careful what you ask for." If demand for our products were to double we would need to move into a leased building and hire one or more employees. This would change quite a few things; from basic liability insurance, to all of the taxes and record keeping associated with employing people. It introduces the many-hats-problem. In an ideal world, production demand will remain modest, but sufficient to maintain a modest profit month-to-month. I will get old enough that I will not want to do all of the fabrication myself. I need to be planning for that day. Meanwhile, we can offer a degree of product customization not readily available from a company that orders product from overseas.
We highly recommend the book The Passion Economy By Adam Davidson. The subtitle is New Rules for Thriving in the Twenty-First Century. We were stunned at how applicable this book is to our business. We are rocketeers and have had many years of experience with cobbled-together launch controllers built in someones garage (including our's). In many cases they were hard to use or not clearly comprehensible in operation. We have watched people trying to troubleshoot a problem that was preventing a launch, with no clear signs of what was wrong. Is it the battery? Bad connection? It was working for the most recent launch! Rocketeers tend to be technically astute. Many are Ham Radio operators and most have some interest in RC aircraft and other "technical" hobbies. Many of us are at and age where we experienced the Heathkit era, and spent many hours in Radio Shack. So if you belong to a rocketry club it is likely that someone in the group is capable of building a launch controller. In many cases they have. It works and it didn't cost a lot, but that was based on free labor and a willingness of that member to take responsibility for the maintenance and operation of the unit forever. Which often does not work out forever.
Since there are very few producers of launch controllers and I have a passion for electronics that is about equal to my passion for organizing and optimizing things: Impulse Launch Systems was born.
