JP Aerospace Blog

About 400 PongSats on the last mission were from Japan.  Forty-four of those were from Ginganosato Elementary School.

Away 66 balloon carried a valve experiment. Because of the experiment we had the balloon extreme close to the vehicle. It let us get a great shot of the burst.

PongSats experience micro-gravity on descent. Here’s are PongSats on Away 65 floating:

Coming soon…

PongSats are being sorted, images and video put to backups and equipment being broken down.

Away 65 Lift off

Away 66 heading for the top

Everyone is back out of the cliffs and mountains safe. All five flight vehicles are now recovered. The only thing left is the drive back to civilization.

The mission has had big ups and big down and is still in progress. The three PongSats and in house research missions went extremely well. All the vehicles and PongSats recovered. The later flights of the two vehicles we flew for a clients research also went very well.

The bad part is that we had an accident during the recovery operation. Karl was injured when the truck he was driving rolled. He is doing very well in the hospital in Reno and is expected to full recover and be release in a few days. The other occupant of the truck was not hurt. Karl is in great spirits, but this was out first serious accident in 35 years and it’s rattled the team a bit.

We are heading out again in a few hours to retrieve the last two vehicles. They are pretty high up a mountain  in rugged terrain however, they look very recoverable.

More news as it unfolds.

JP

Away 65 up top with PongSats

Snow, high winds, four high altitude vehicles and a thousand PongSats. The team is rolling for the desert!