JP Aerospace Blog

A great big thank you goes out to Convergent Design. We’re flying their nanoFlash video recorder on Away 43. They have very graciously provided the two 64gig high performance memory cards that the unit uses. We’re doing some 100 fps HD video on this flight.

www.convergent-design.com

Sint-Pieterscollege in Belgium has flown with us on more flights then any other school. Check out there great space site.

http://www.freewebs.com/project-space/usaballonvluchten.htm

The five vehicle we’re flying on the next mission are under final construction. The main systems are all complete and it’s down to the long list of little things. Saturday the team really went to town. We had a list of eight things that had to get done. At the end of the day all eight were lined off and three scheduled for next Wednesday were also cranked out.

These five will be covering a whole range of objectives from new tech to working out bugs for the Tandem mission this summer. The plan is to launch the first four at 45 minute intervals. That will be the most vehicles we’ve managed in the air at once. Mission control will have their hands full with this one. The fifth vehicle we’re going to fly the next day.

Camera controller and Parallax Propeller based balloon release system.

Envelope for Jellyfish balloon.

Documentary producer Foolish Earthling Productions is using their high altitude ad as a very cool background on their web site.

http://www.foolishearthling.com/0_17_writings_of_lennick.html

This image was taken on the Away 38 mission. One more ad space is available on the up coming April 24th mission.

We’ve started experimenting with a new material, paper honeycomb panels. It’s light, very stiff, strong and cheap. We plan on using it as an alternative to foam for a core material in carbon structures. We also going to try it out for balloon interface panels for the next Dark Sky Station and Ascender.

As a first test it’s being used a the instrument deck on Away 46. That will give us a chance to see how it handles extreme cold and vacuum. The deck ended up the same weight as our existing carbon and foam deck. However it took only a fraction of the time to make and a quarter of the cost.

I’m giving a talk Wednesday March 24th at the Sacramento chapter of the AIAA’s monthly meeting.  It will be all about shooting commercials and documentaries at 100,000 feet. Here’s a flyer from AIAA with the info:

http://www.aiaasacramento.com/media/2010-03-24_Dinner.pdf

If you’re anywhere close, come on down!

The folks at Grey London (the producers of the Toshiba Space Chair Commercial) just sent word they posted another video of JPA on YouTube. It’s more behind scenes of the chair launch and recovery. Did I really look that tired?

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