Author: Administrator

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.

We made our Kickstarter goal!!!!!

Thank you everyone for supporting PongSats!!

We have 19 hours to go. Can we push it up even higher?

John

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1569698176/2000-student-projects-to-the-edge-of-space

STEM Nation just sent me a link to a great PongSat video they made. It’s great! It will make you smile.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1569698176/2000-student-projects-to-the-edge-of-space

What would happen if we went over the goal amount? Cool things would happen! We just updated the Kickstarter site with what would happen if we went over the funding amount:

What if we go over? What would we do with the money?
Extended Goals:

$16,000, (if we raise $5,000 over our goal) we will fly 500 more PongSats on the September mission. The extra funds would allow us to build an additional vehicle and buy the extra balloon and helium.

$22,000, (double the goal) we will fly another entire PongSat mission in the spring of 2015 with another 2000 Student experiments on board!

$36,000 This is the exciting. This will allow us to launch our whole new student exploration program: SeaPongs

We will carry student experiments to the depths of the sea and back again. We will do it by the thousands and completely free to students, teachers, explorers and anyone who wonders about the ocean depths. The vehicle is like an inverted balloon carrying the SeaPongs down below 5,000 feet and back again.

We a preparing Away 97, 98 and 99 for a May 4th lift off. We are conducting some pretty significant Airship to Orbit tests on these three. There will also be lots of PongSats. In addition there are some completely awesome MiniCube!

Table Tennis Nation have given a great shout out to PongSat!

There are now 1,427 PongSats signed up for the September mission.

Remember Kickstarted is all or nothing. Please help us get it flown!

2000 individual flight experiments, one mission.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1569698176/2000-student-projects-to-the-edge-of-space