Away 35 and the Tandem airship are the two mission currently on deck. We’re still working out the team scheduling for Away 35. We expect to get it in the air very soon. As you’ve read, we’ve been spending the time banging our collective heads trying to squeeze more range out of the command telemetry system. We’ve been also putting the finishing touches on the new data gathering/logging system. The first experiment to use the data gather/logger will a drag management system for the Ascender airship. No drag will be managed on Away 35. It will just be a shake down of the system running at 120,000 feet.
Tandem has had a few modifications. The performance of the transmitting video has been very poor on the last few away missions. Upon inspection it looks like this gear has spend way too much time at altitude (over 20 flights to 100,000 feet) and it needs to be replaced. However, that’s not going to happen until next years budget, so the system and it’s four camera heads were pulled. The three pound weight saving will be taken up my an additional recording video camera. This also allowed us to move the backup GPS telemetry system to the spot where the video transmitter was. That solves an intermittent problem we were having with that system causing interference with the circuit on the parachute cannon.