JP Aerospace Blog

It took about 5 years of work, but we finally did it! We were just awarded the patent for Airship To Orbit.

On Monday the commercial we shot for Toshiba will air across Europe and Japan.  Monday I’ll post a link here so folks in other places can watch it.   Here’s a screen shot to hold you over.

A few weeks ago I had a chance to speak at a balloon workshop at NCAR (National Center for Atmospheric Research) in Boulder Colorado.

http://www.boulder.swri.edu/LCANS09/Home.html

It was small workshop, only about 30 folks. All the big players with the multimillion dollar balloon projects were there. I was pretty floored by the whole thing. With few exception innovation in dead in big balloon research. Sure, the balloons are a little bigger, the telescopes are a little more sophisticated, but there’s nothing going on that someone working balloon 50 years ago wouldn’t need more than an hour to be up to speed on. The workshop was called “Bridging the Gap to Space”. Sadly it was good and brilliant people locked in the the us vs. them with the space folks trying to figure out the best way to beg for more funding.

I don’t think they knew what to make of me….

It’s was a beautiful facility. Day one was sunny, day three a big stow storm shut it all down.

You won’t expect a parachute to be completely unfurled and taunt at 98,000 feet, however…

The next flight on deck is the Tandem airship.  Poor Tandem keeps getting bumped back for paying gigs.  We have a tight weather window left.  By the end of November the winds aloft will be up over 100 mph and the low morning surface winds will be gone.  Tandem is capable of flying in pretty harsh conditions but we want a calm day for the first flight. If the weather goes bad the flight will need to wait till spring. However, the team is pushing hard to get it in this year.

Last night we stripped down the vehicle and did a complete reweighing of all components.  We’re making upgrade to all the systems and this weekend reintergration will start.

The boom and chair make these vehicles pretty tricky to get into the air.

Here are some of the original concept drawings for the Away 39-42 missions.