Last April we dropped at light bulb from the edge of space for a BBC documentary with Richard Hammond (the ‘Top Gear’ show guy). It was top secret so we haven’t posted anything about the mission. However, I just got a bunch of e-mails about the show. It played Tuesday night on the BBC in England. I haven’t seen it yet, but they’ve posted a clip on you tube.
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We’ve begun testing the upper deck balloon interface. This system will be used by Ascenders and Dark Sky Stations.It does two things: It allows multiple easy interfaces to the inner lifting cells (this was a huge problem on Ascender 175) and it allows us to use inexpensive flat plastic film instead of outrageously expensive thin film shaped balloons. The test cell/balloon was half scale for both the next Ascender and the next DSS. Yesterday the team began building a full scale cell to test.
This is the moment of balloon failure.
From last October’s flight.
We’re posted a photo album of all the PongSats ready for lift off at the PongSat facebook site:
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