Author: Administrator

The mission video is up on youtube!

The video is from all six vehicles. We used seven on board HD cameras and six ground HD camera. We had a high speed camera looking up at the balloon for an amazing burst slow-mo shot.

We shipped the PongSats back without the mission DVD. It takes two weeks to get the DVD’s made and the end of the school year is getting very close. I finished the video yesterday and today it goes to the DVD production company. We’ll send them to the PongSat participants as soon as there back. Until then watch it on line. It came out really great.

We put a 120 frames per second camera on the Away 81 PongSat mission. This is looking up at the balloon while it bursts at the edge of space.

We’re rolling for the desert. Liftoff at 5:30am Monday morning.

Wish us luck and watch us live:

http://space.klm.com/

PongSats always get a few seconds of micro-gravity on descent.

These PongSats are aboard  Away 82 at 98,000 feet.

Five vehicles launched and five recover!  We flew just over 2000 PongSat student experiments, the most we’ve ever flown at once. All five launches were in winds that were steady 20 with gusts to 46 mph.

One landed on a mountain and took four days to recover, but all is well. More details soon.

In a few minutes we will be off to the desert. Tomorrow morning we will be flying five high altitude balloon missions.

On board will be over 2,000 PongSat student experiments, three MiniCubes, seven cameras, and piles of radio and satellite uplink systems. It looks like we’re facing a 70 to 90 mile recovery across the mud in the high Sierras.

Wish us luck!

Beyond Geek and been joining us on our adventures and has posted a great webisode!

The 10,000th PongSat will be flying to 100,000 feet on our April mission. This is a huge milestone for JP Aerospace.

The PongSat program is growing in orbit expanding leaps. We already have PongSat number 14,000 signed up for a flight this fall. While NASA is cutting back on it’s education out reach because of budget,  JPA intends not only to take up the slack but to keep escalating people participation to completely insane new heights.

If you haven’t heard of PongSat, it is our free payload flight program. Students put their experiment in a ping pong ball. They mail it to us, we fly them to 100,000 feet or higher on our balloons, airships and platforms. After the flight we mail their PongSat back. Over 35,000 people have participated. Participants range from kindergartners to university professors to artists.