JP Aerospace Blog

Yea!  We got selected as number eight on the Ten Best Aerospace Websites.

http://www.topsite.com/best/aerospace

Our flight schedule is a little unsettled at the moment.  The October flight has been completely full for a while with 2000 PongSats. We are trying to working another PongSat flight in. We should know within two weeks we’ll start signed up PongSats and sending out ID numbers.

Above is what the customer sent us as an idea of what they were looking for. Below is what we delivered at the edge of space.

Here are two great news stories about students opening their PongSats after flight!

http://www.advertiserdemocrat.com/node/603526
http://www.jconline.com/article/20130515/NEWS04/305150034

This Saturday and Sunday JP will be on the radio with Senator Bill Bradley.

The Senator’s radio show “American Voices” is on Sirius Satellite network. The Senator and JP will talk about PongSat, space education and Airship to Orbit. Listen in!

American Voices airs on Sirius XM Satellite Radio Channel 124
Saturdays: 7AM, 1PM, and 7PM; Sundays: 4AM, 10AM, 4PM, and 11PM.
(All times are EST)

American Voices facebook page:

https://www.facebook.com/Americanvoiceswithsenatorbillbradley?fref=ts

Here’s a highlights version of the last April’s PongSat and MiniCube flight video. Just under four minutes but like movie trailers it has the good bits!

Dale Schornack has posted his news piece on our KLM Mission.
Great video and great team interviews!!!!!!!!!!

The mission video is up on youtube!

The video is from all six vehicles. We used seven on board HD cameras and six ground HD camera. We had a high speed camera looking up at the balloon for an amazing burst slow-mo shot.

We shipped the PongSats back without the mission DVD. It takes two weeks to get the DVD’s made and the end of the school year is getting very close. I finished the video yesterday and today it goes to the DVD production company. We’ll send them to the PongSat participants as soon as there back. Until then watch it on line. It came out really great.

We put a 120 frames per second camera on the Away 81 PongSat mission. This is looking up at the balloon while it bursts at the edge of space.

We’re rolling for the desert. Liftoff at 5:30am Monday morning.

Wish us luck and watch us live:

http://space.klm.com/

PongSats always get a few seconds of micro-gravity on descent.

These PongSats are aboard  Away 82 at 98,000 feet.

Five vehicles launched and five recover!  We flew just over 2000 PongSat student experiments, the most we’ve ever flown at once. All five launches were in winds that were steady 20 with gusts to 46 mph.

One landed on a mountain and took four days to recover, but all is well. More details soon.

In a few minutes we will be off to the desert. Tomorrow morning we will be flying five high altitude balloon missions.

On board will be over 2,000 PongSat student experiments, three MiniCubes, seven cameras, and piles of radio and satellite uplink systems. It looks like we’re facing a 70 to 90 mile recovery across the mud in the high Sierras.

Wish us luck!