JP Aerospace Blog

Moment of Launch

Balloon Burst

One Roll then Reentry

Moment of Landing

The next seven for July.

You know you’ve made the big time when you appear in a comic book.

It’s from ‘Escape from Terra’. Check it out!

Sewing day. We need to make eleven new fins and three new parachute for the next mission.

The shop is so full of boxes of parts for the seven vehicle mission that we can hardly walk around. The big killer is the cables and connectors. Each vehicle has over 50 cables-connector-adapters. Time that by seven and you can see why these things take over an hour just to plug in!

We building seven new high racks for flights this summer. The space community is always concerned with “flight rate”. The notion is the higher the flight rate the lower the operation and build costs. Well, we seem to be in the middle of a live study of that idea. We’ve pushed ten big complicated vehicles up this year so far and we’re only getting started.

It’s a hard push but I think what we learn this year will serve us well in the future.

What a mission! Four flights to over 100,000 feet, very worried clients breaking out in cheers and tears when it all came together live from the edge of space, incredible hikes and climbs to the top of ridges with staggering views into isolated valleys of the high Sierras, a rescue operation for a recovery team in trouble, little sleep and hard work for three days in the desert and a team that was in the “zone” the entire time preforming at a level of personnel best and cool smooth professionalism I have never witnessed in the several decades of doing this.

Everyone and all the vehicles are back safe and sound. In a few weeks we can post pictures and video and talk about it all. This mission was only a test run for the actual missions coming soon.

The mission control van has just rolled. We’re heading once more into the dust of the desert and the blackness of the edge of space.

We’ve haven’t been able to talk much about this one. It for some friends of ours and they get to handle the public info. I will say this in going to be a pretty amazing set of flights. There will be four heavies all running to 100,000 feet. There are the most complex high rack we’re every done.    We’ve been pushing 15 hour days for a week with nine folks from the client.  The winds aloft are howling and it looks like more long recoveries.

Back Monday with news.

JP