JP Aerospace Blog

Mach 4 anyone? The newest upgrades on our hypersonic wind tunnel (shock tube) are ready for round one testing.

The shock tube will be used for active drag reduction studies.

For the last year we’ve been putting multiple vehicles in the air at once. This have given us lots of new operational capabilities. We videoed one vehicle from another, even seeing a balloon burst from a miles away. We can relay commands between vehicles and coordinate landing sites.

We just received the new nozzle for the shock tube from the 3D print house. We designed it but it needed laser lithographic instead of conventional printing so we had it printed by Shapeways. The shock tube runs at mach 2.2 now. The new nozzle will get it to Mach 3. After that we’re putting an expansion chamber on the end that will get it running at Mach 4.

This weekend we installed the ballast tanks on Bellavia.

On May 4th we flew three high altitude missions. We carried 800 PongSat student experiments and ten MiniCube payloads. We also conducted ATO engine and flight control experiments and telemetry experiments.

All the flight went really well. One balloon didn’t go as high as we wanted but we still exceeded all the mission objectives.

Here’s the altitudes:

The team is heading out to Northern Nevada in just a few minutes. We are conducting three balloon flights to 100,000 feet. There are PongSats, MiniCubes, two Magneto-hydrodynamic tests on board along with several additional Airship to Orbit experiments. First lift off is Sunday morning at 7am.