JP Aerospace Blog

Saturday Tandem soared to 95,085 feet.  She flew perfect. We fired up the propellers and drove her around then softly touched down three hours later.

Before driving Tandem at the edge of space the propellers need to be balanced.  After balancing them with little pieces of tape I pull off and weight the tape. Then I weight out epoxy and use a syringe to eject it into the hollow tip of the blade. The blades are hollow carbon/Kevlar blades we make ourselves.  One prop set took 2.3 grams of epoxy and the other was way off and took 5.4 grams.

I can’t help it I love this pic.

This is from a PongSat mission we flew last March.

Tandem will be JP Aerospace’s 126th mission.

It was a late night calibrating the new helium flow meter.  After all the fun we had filling, deflating, filling, deflating (wash, rinse, repeat) an eight foot balloon in the electronic room we decided to check the calibration of the existing meter. The good news is both meters match exactly. This is really going to speedup the Tandem fill time.

Tandem has been in the shop for three years. Yesterday she got outside a bit to get some fresh air. This was the last big step. We disassembled Tandem as we would for shipping,took her out to the front parking lot, reassembled her and ran full system tested. This was both an engineering and a training exercise. It was a very long and hot day for the team, but they really worked out all the little details and got Tandem ready for flight.