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On Monday the commercial we shot for Toshiba will air across Europe and Japan.  Monday I’ll post a link here so folks in other places can watch it.   Here’s a screen shot to hold you over.

A few weeks ago I had a chance to speak at a balloon workshop at NCAR (National Center for Atmospheric Research) in Boulder Colorado.

http://www.boulder.swri.edu/LCANS09/Home.html

It was small workshop, only about 30 folks. All the big players with the multimillion dollar balloon projects were there. I was pretty floored by the whole thing. With few exception innovation in dead in big balloon research. Sure, the balloons are a little bigger, the telescopes are a little more sophisticated, but there’s nothing going on that someone working balloon 50 years ago wouldn’t need more than an hour to be up to speed on. The workshop was called “Bridging the Gap to Space”. Sadly it was good and brilliant people locked in the the us vs. them with the space folks trying to figure out the best way to beg for more funding.

I don’t think they knew what to make of me….

It’s was a beautiful facility. Day one was sunny, day three a big stow storm shut it all down.

You won’t expect a parachute to be completely unfurled and taunt at 98,000 feet, however…

The next flight on deck is the Tandem airship.  Poor Tandem keeps getting bumped back for paying gigs.  We have a tight weather window left.  By the end of November the winds aloft will be up over 100 mph and the low morning surface winds will be gone.  Tandem is capable of flying in pretty harsh conditions but we want a calm day for the first flight. If the weather goes bad the flight will need to wait till spring. However, the team is pushing hard to get it in this year.

Last night we stripped down the vehicle and did a complete reweighing of all components.  We’re making upgrade to all the systems and this weekend reintergration will start.

The boom and chair make these vehicles pretty tricky to get into the air.

Here are some of the original concept drawings for the Away 39-42 missions.

This picture shows us tuning the  configuration.  Everything is hanging from the ceiling. The vehicle, boom and chair all needed to be balanced.  We need to be sure to keep oscillations low and that any swings would be dampened, pretty tricky with long boom with a camera on the end.  On top of that the camera needed to be pointed at the chair at all times, sounds simple but….

The flight chairs weren’t much heaver then our placeholder foamcore chair.  There were made in a movie studio model shop.  Even inches away you couldn’t tell them from real chairs until you picked them up. The wood was all balsa with hollow sections and the cushions were fabric over balsa frames.  We worried all the time about someone accidentally sitting on one!

Four flight, four recoveries, Eight fully loaded HD video recorders!

We made it to 98,000 feet, 93,000 feet, 94,000 feet and 82,000 feet. The best part is when the director, producer and fifteen other assorted customer folks let out a great cheer when they played the peak altitude footage.

It was all pretty amazing, one of the directors of Batman was our director for the shoot. I’ll write all the details we soon as we finish unpacking.

The team is just about ready to roll to the desert for our flights for Toshiba. We’re been carrying nine completely bleeding edge, and very cool HD video camera systems. The video will be stunning. Were launching four vehicles in all.

Toshiba has setup a site for a mission and will be tweeting live:

www.wherewillitland.com

We’re be a few days in the desert. As soon as we get back I’ll post the adventure.

Wish us luck!

JP

(Before anybody gets worried were flying commercial frequencies on this one.)