JP Aerospace Blog

Configuration concept drawings of the electric/chemical hybrid engine arrays for the Ascender orbital airship. We’re projecting eight arrays of four.

Next on Deck: Ascender Ellipse. This is the first Ascender airship with an elliptical cross section & an all air beam internal structure. It’s just a little one, 26 ft long. It’s for low altitude structural tests. The Ellipse is 70% complete. We hope to fly before years end.

We’re starting to replace the hand made boards on Bellavia (our sub) with PCB’s This one just came in today. It’s the sensor breakout board. It connects an Arduino computer to a whole set of sensors. Kudos to Chris for a great job on board design.

Working the checklist. Away 129 had 75 tasks on the checklist. It was one of our more complex high racks with 4 separate telemetry systems, 5 cameras, data logger, full array of sensors, beacon, in house and student experiments and our standard flight system set.

Final prep before launch. Now we’re down to things like foreign object removal, rigging inspection, balloon sep system power up. Then it’s the final ‘GOs’ from mission control, videographer, traffic, and balloon team.