JP Aerospace Blog

This is a view at the moment of balloon burst of Away 71. This was our 151st mission.

Last Friday and Saturday we conducted three flight. Two for a customers and one research/PongSat mission.

A sure sign of an impending mission, Paul spiffing up the mission control van.

The High Rack is our workhorse test vehicle. Even though it has the held on to the same basic configuration I was stuck this morning looking at Away 25 from 2004 how much has changed. The foam fins have been replaced by nylon ones stretched over a carbon frame, Those three pound each (there’s two!) Hi-8 camcorders are no more, on top the balloon cutaway pyros wrapped in fiberglass insulation have been replace by a neat plastic box with nichrome string cutters, I shudder thinking about that fin mounted parachute with the ground commanded release strap. The parachute auto deploy baskets we use now are bulkier but don’t require any input from anywhere to work. The standard upper deck is no where to be seen on this old guy. From the antennas I can tell this was our old second generation command and control system. We’re on gen five now and on the verge of moving to all satellite/internet command systems. I think there are about 40 other changes since 2004. With all that from 100 feet away after launch it’s still our old reliable cargo hauler to the edge of space. I hope we fly a few hundred more.

Saturday we filmed radioactive particles in our cloud chamber. Seeing the subatomic particles streaking across the chamber leaving visible contrails is the easy part. Getting it to show up on video is the hard part. We are conducting a positron survey in the upper atmosphere this fall using this gear but we need to be able to record the results. We’re finally getting good, if blurry, results.
The top frame is raw, the bottom is enhanced.

Sometimes you build spaceships and sometimes you build tools. We use some really powerful magnets in our projects. One of the many hard part about strong magnets is getting them apart from each other. The solution is a non ferrous hand shear. In other words we needed to make a giant wooden cheese slicer. The first version was made of foam (to make sure we got the size right). Version two was wood. It’s still a little scary to use but it gets the job done.

The Away 24 flight tested the on board wireless network used on the Ascender 90 and Ascender 175. This was one of those cold January missions back in 2004. The retrieval of this one became infamous in the JPA annuals as “Recovery with wolves”.

While researching a problem I ended up down an unexpected side trail in space history.

Our new launch site has fewer roads which means longer hikes to retrieved the landed balloon vehicle. The hike in is the easy part. Carrying the twenty three pound balloon vehicle back out is the awkward part.

The idea: We need a wagon.

Now before you say it, a lot of this area is motor vehicle restricted, so no quads and we just can’t afford that helicopter yet.

I knew that one Apollo missions carried a “rickshaw” to the moon to carry equipment but that it didn’t work. I decided to look it up, see what was wrong with it and go from there. Why would you look to the moon to build a wagon? Hey! we’re space geeks.

The moon rickshaw was actually named MET for Mobile Equipment Transport and it flew to the moon on Apollo 14. Every reference talks about just how bad it was. The most repeated line is “it was so poor it was easier for the astronauts to carry than pull”. I downloaded the assembly drawings and even the original NASA manual. Hmm, It looked pretty good, what was wrong with it?

Then it happened, I saw a video with Astronaut Alan Sheppard bouncing and running with the MET bounding behind him on the moon. He was going on and on about how great it was. “Wait a second”, I thought. They said MET was a disaster. What’s the real story?

I read reports written by the astronauts and all the transcripts from the lunar surface. A different tale emerged. They loved their little wagon.

The negative story came from Apollo 14′s last day on the moon.

The astronaut’s last task was a long climb up the side of a crater. Up on the crater wall things got pretty rough. It was a steep slope with deep dust and huge boulders. This was far more than the MET was design for. It became clear that the MET was wasn’t going to roll through the deep dust. The MET still stepped up and saved the day. There was too much equipment that was needed for the crater’s rim to leave behind. The astronauts got on each side of the MET turning it into a basket. Up to the crater they went and successfully completed the mission.

Blame it on sound bites. The MET being hard to use in deep dust was the story that stuck.

I love actually this. A cool piece of tech that’s been discarded by history and it just waiting for me to take advantage of.

Our MET has forty-eight inch diameter wheels. The whole thing only weights 13 pounds and made of Styrofoam.We traded weight for durability. The wheels on the MET 2 are only good for fifty miles in rock and brush. However that is more than we need. We’re putting an umbrella mount on the handle so we can hike in the shade.

The original engineers and techs that worked on the MET have been done a disservice. They created a great piece of gear that did a great job on another world.

We’ve named our foam, tape and carbon creation the MET 2 in their honor.