We’re sending three to 100,000 feet. The team is packed and only waiting for me to finish this post.
These are the most sophisticated high racks we’ve every flown. It’s a big tech leap for us. A documentary film crew will be with us.
Wish us luck!
JP
Good Luck!!
cool. you guys are really doing it! good luck.
All the best to all…
Good Luck!! God Bless!
Best of luck! And a good journey for the 3 missions…
three payloads?
John and the whole team: we wish you lots of luck, godspeed, and fine weather,
it’s great for the students to build pongsats and fly them with you guys!!!!
Hope our microcontrollers do well as new technology has been used in their manufacture.
Get a fine altitude (our last succesfull measurements feel short just at temperature minimum, we hope to do better this time!!!)
Congratulations on a great program!!!!
Erik
Last week, I have been visiting a first grade handicap class school here in Canada. And discussions turn around the JP Aerospace missions, the pongsat program, and if they will succeed at the end…
My 2 questions to them were: How to help the team to make sure ATO program will work and what would you do with this big space station balloon?
You would not imagine all the incroyable and funny ideas they came up with, but somes were also very good ones !
So, they are all waiting and watching the site since. I’m sending to you guys their best wishes,and dreams to join JP Pongsat, and are all blowing in the sky to push high in space the 3 Aways…
Hope your mission went well! hoping for reports of success!
Here’s a mission update: The weather was perfect, but some electronic glitches, coupled with the needs of the film crew, delayed our launches. Since the 3 payloads would be launched so far apart in time, thye would be spread over a large area on recovery. JP made a command decision to hold the PongSat launch for a later date. As it turned out, this was a good decision. The forst two payloads were separated by about 10 miles. Since the terrain in this desert is very rugged, that’s a BIG spread. It appears we were too ambitious in trying to launch 3 payloads within 1/2 hour.
We received a tracker radio signal from the first payload that afternoon, but could not get a firm fix. We abandoned the search at 8PM, with the team returning exhausted. The following day, JP and two team members returned to the area and located the first payload. We had received a good GPS signal from the second payload until about 10,000 feet on its descent. JP and the team are seaching the projected landing site right now.
For the PongSat gang: don’t be disappointed by this delay. We will launch your PongSats in the very near future on their own special mission. We did not want to risk loosing your valuable experiments.
Both launched vehicles exceeded 100,000 feet. We now know that the balloon fill estimate (cubic feet of helium) was right on.
JP will provide further updates when he returns from the desert.
I personally want to thank you all for your interest in our programs. Your participation encourages us to press on when we get tired or frustrated with problems. Your interest is our “pay” in this all-volunteer program.
Good luck for 100,000 ft. I would love to have any GPS logs from this or previous flights to run through StarTraX. They would be awesome in Google Earth!