Author: Administrator

Yesterday we laid up a foam and carbon fiber part for the chase plane. We’re installing a whole aircraft parachute inside the wing.  The part is the deck that goes in the wing that the parachute sits on. Just now we pulled the part out of the mold. It looks great and fits perfect. The next step is to cut slots in it for the parachute mounting webbing.

Night balloon fill from our 2001 Mesospheric Explorer launch.

Here’s Away 47 800 feet about the ground.  There are 300 PongSats on board descending waaaay too close the lake. It touched down on the beach.

It was debug Tandem day, but it went really well.  The motor RPM were down. We suspected the hall effect sensors but it turned out to be software.  We found the problem just before we started unsoldering sensors.

We also mounted down the main controller and tracking system and chased down a timing problem in the motor controller subsystem. We had taken out the computer in the sensor controller to use it on the Samsung mission.  We reinstalled it and it’s all fine except the compass calibration data in the e-prom is wiped. Tandem now thinks North is somewhere toward Hawaii…. Oh well, another thing on the todo list.

These are waaaay back from 1995. The first is a vacuum rocket motor ignition test. The second is a rockoon launch from a bunch of four foot balloons.

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The team  spun up the big propellers on Tandem Saturday.  The blades haven’t been balanced yet so they vibrate a bit but all went well.  The propellers are designed to run at 100,000 feet so running them at sea level is like driving them through chocolate pudding.  It really  heats us the whole system. For the rest of the testing we’re going to use the old Ascender 90 sea-level test propellers. We got them mounted on the motors, they just look so small…..

This beautiful image was taken during the Samsung mission by team photographer Natalie Vollrath.

A vehicle never seems alive to me until the main controller is powered up and talking. We got the controller talking to the ground station, accepting commands and sending back data from the sub systems.

Some people lift weights to stay in shape, we lift airships.  We spend the day lifting Tandem, checking balance and moving systems. After an afternoon of an inch here and an an inch there we have her balanced with in 0.2 pounds which is about the same accuracy as the balloon fill so it’s time for hard mount of all the systems.

Next Saturday we’ll be spinning up the motors.