JP Aerospace Blog

Sometimes you build ships and sometimes you build things to ship the ships. One of the big costs for the upcoming Tandem flight is the truck to get it to the launch site. In spite of the ability to breaking half it still takes a pretty large truck to move it in spite of it only weighing sixty pounds. We looked at conventional flat bed trailers, however the ones large enough are too heavy to pull with van of any of the recovery vehicles.

The solution was to buy a used long sailboat trailer and deck it with lightweight hollow core panels.  The decking is on, now we need to make a ramp and tie down points.  In addition to use for the Tandem the trailer will be used to get the Sky Pup chase plane to the airport. The whole cost? About $600. This compares well against the $1,200 for one time use truck rental.

I just put up the page for the last mission set.

http://jpaerospace.com/away43-46.html

From last months flights.

This is a good view of the rocket launch boxes.

I found another old video that never made it to Youtube.

This is Away 22 climbing away. The team built this balloon for fast climbing. It made it to 91,000 feet soaring up at 1,400 feet per minute with just a minimum of positive lift. We flew this mission in December 2003.

[wp_youtube]JWC61zAxaeA[/wp_youtube]

Lots of pieces across the project were worked on during Saturdays build session.  Paul finished the modifications to one of the small balloon launch bags, Ethan glued together several vehicle antenna mounts for Away 48. Kevin assembled the ceramic insulator for the quad engine MHD power generator and Bob toiled away all day on data conversion from the last mission. Mike did epic battle with the balloon release circuit upgrade.

A lot of other tasks got crossed off the list as well. Progress was made modifying the new Tandem/Sky Pup trailer. I did a radio interview in the middle of it all and Kevin tackled the unfun task of sorting through all the helium tanks from the last mission.

Here’s some images from the Ascender 175.  These were taken about five years ago.  The new Ascender 100 should be rolled out sometime next summer (2011).

Tomorrow at 11:15 am pacific time I’m a guest on the Space Talk radio show in Florida.

You can listen live on the web here:

http://wmmbam.com/pages/spacetalk.html