Author: Administrator

We live on a particularly pretty planet.
View from Away 86.

The drawing was made two years before the flight,

The Book “Floating to Space” is available at our on line store. The airship to orbit program, the balloons, the rockets, the adventure, it’s all in there.

We tested our new valve system on Away 71.

This valve system has three ports: fill, flight termination vent and a valve we can open and close during flight. The valve uses two computers, one is autonomous the second has a wireless connection to the vehicle’s main controller. We sent commands of open and close patterns from the mission control van. The valve lets us control the climb rate, hold at peak altitude and then descend into favorable winds for an easier recovery.

The MET II recovery cart got a great field test on this last mission. We pushed through high brush, rolled over boulders, and hiked straight through washes like they weren’t even there.

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 The foam fins have been replaced by nylon ones stretched over a carbon frame, Those three pound each (there’s two!)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.