Joe Barnard didn’t set out to become an internet rocket scientist. He was a music student at Berklee who just wanted to make things fly. Today, the creator behind BPS.Space spends his days in a workshop filled with model rockets, cameras, and half-finished prototypes.

“At the end of high school, two years after having to ask to go to the bathroom, people ask, ‘What do you want to do with the rest of your life?’” Joe says, laughing. He chose music, but somewhere between mixing tracks and filming music videos for classmates, he began to crave something more technical.

After graduating, Joe and a friend built a small business shooting weddings and music videos. It was 2015 when he stumbled upon a SpaceX broadcast online. Watching those early rocket landings lit a spark. “It was so inspiring to me that I realized, ‘I have to get a job here,’” he recalls. 

Without an engineering degree or aerospace experience, Joe decided to build his way in. That summer, he founded BPS.Space, a project to replicate SpaceX-style vertical takeoff and landing (VTVL) using model rockets. “My primary goal was to launch and land a model rocket like SpaceX was trying to do at the time,” he says. “And that would be like an attention-grabbing thing – enough to get my foot in the door.”

It wasn’t easy. “Nothing worked for the first year,” Joe admits. “I flew 10 rockets, and none of them worked.” Even the local police took notice. “I got the cops calling on me once or twice. I’d show up with all these cameras pointed at a big rocket in the middle of the field.” 

Still, the setbacks didn’t discourage him. A year later, in October 2016, his first successful flight changed everything. “After that, it became really easy to just take the thing that worked and only tweak it slightly, but it felt great.”

His persistence mirrored that of the aerospace pioneers he admired. The failures became part of the story – one that would eventually draw a devoted audience. “Nobody likes it when it works every time,” Joe says. “It’s the same reason that people watch NASCAR, right? Secretly, a lot of people are hoping to see a crash.”

Turning a Passion Into a Business

By 2017, BPS.Space had shifted from a personal experiment to a budding business. The turning point came when Joe began selling flight computers designed to stabilize model rockets during ascent. 

“For the first two years, it was a money pit,” he says. “I’d burned through a lot of my savings. I realized if I couldn’t get this thing to at least sort of fund itself, it wasn’t going to be able to continue.” Selling these computers not only recouped his costs but also helped define his niche as a creator-engineer straddling both the DIY and educational worlds.

Over time, Joe’s YouTube channel became a full-fledged creative enterprise. His videos no longer simply documented tests. They told stories. “In 2018, I made one video where I stood in front of a whiteboard and explained what happened,” he recalls. “It got five or six thousand views, which was huge at the time. So I just followed that and kept peeling back the curtain.” 

Audiences connected with his transparency. “Explaining what I was doing and why I was doing it was a big change that started growth on the channel.”

Today, BPS.Space operates as a one-person studio, with Joe handling everything from design and testing to scripting and editing. “I tried to hire an editor over the summer, and it went okay,” he says. “But there’s so much ‘creative voice’ in what an edit looks like and how it feels, that I do kind of like having my hand in every part of it.”

“Where I do get help is on the social media and short-form content side of things. I hired my friend Tiff to help produce shorter videos and strategize a bit about maintaining the non-YouTube pages: Instagram and TikTok,” Joe explains how significant it was to get help with those things. “I get to focus more on actually building things.”

The Value of Content

If there’s one principle that defines Joe’s approach, it’s crafting content that’s true to himself. 

“A move that I see other creators make from time to time – and that I’ve done myself – is thinking, ‘If I keep scaling up, I should just get nicer and nicer equipment so it looks more cinematic,’” he says. “But actually, the thing that helps people connect with you is embracing the amateur aspect of it.” Viewers, he adds, aren’t showing up for perfect production, but for the story.

Instead, he leans into the imperfections that make his work human. It’s an approach that has helped him cultivate not just an audience, but a community. Through Patreon and an active Discord server, supporters follow along as he builds, tests, and learns in real time. “They get to see the process. It’s just a way of showing the people who are funding the project where their money is going.”

Community, Critique, and Collaboration

For Joe, audience engagement is part of his creative process. 

“I’ll let myself be influenced by people’s comments, both subconsciously and otherwise,” he says. When viewers recently pointed out flaws in his epoxy tests, he didn’t take offense; he used the feedback to plan follow-up experiments. “It makes it really easy for me to be responsive to what people are saying,” he explains. “And sometimes I’ll solicit ideas for a name for a rocket, but that usually doesn’t go great. They named one ‘Thrusty McThrustFace.’”

Despite occasional online negativity, Joe has learned to keep his perspective. “They used to bother me a lot more,” he says, in regards to mean comments. “These platforms incentivize negative engagement because it does really well, so when people say mean things, you can be a little less surprised.”

Joe is managed by talent management and creative agency Ziggurat XYZ.

Creativity Meets Business

Like many independent creators, Joe’s revenue comes from multiple sources: YouTube ad revenue, Patreon support, and brand sponsorships. 

He takes care to maintain his audience’s trust.“I’m fortunate to be able to turn down requests from brands I don’t really want to work with.” Authenticity, again, proves central: “When a brand shows up, and they’re like, you need to say these exact words, that’s usually a red flag.”

Joe is also candid about the realities of balancing engineering projects with creator deadlines. “If I’m building a rocket and we have to test something when it flies, it’s hard to make the video until the rocket flies,” he explains. “And brands usually do a pretty good job understanding that schedules are fluid.” The unpredictability, it seems, is part of the job.

Now, nearly a decade after that first failed launch, Joe’s ambitions are as bold as ever. “I want to shoot a camera out of a rocket to basically take a selfie of the rocket,” he shares. “Whenever I fly these things, they’ve got little cameras on board so you can see as if you were riding on the rocket. But what I want to see is the whole thing in the air.”

In the long run, he’s focused on one goal: sending a rocket to space and documenting every step of the process. But just as important, he wants to inspire others to try. 

“It’s a bit of a lonely job,” he says. “Every time a new creator pops up with a thousand subscribers or less, and they make some good video about their rocket project or their other engineering project, I’m like, ‘Yes!’ 

“If you’re reading this, make a video about the thing you’re building. Join. It’s fun.”

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