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Just for a moment. We took the Sky Pup to the airport for high speed taxi runs and hop tests today. All went incredibly well. During one of the runs I brought the Pup just off the ground a couple of feet and flew down the runway.  Does this mark the official beginning of our manned flight program? Today three of our pilots got in training before the crosswinds picked up and we had to call it a day.

The trailer got a good shake down carrying the plane 35 miles to the airport and back.  It was a good day.

The Neodymium magnets for the quad engine arrived today. They will be used in the MHD generator portion of the engine.

The ruler had to be taped down down to keep it from wrapping around the magnets.

The engine of the Sky Pup roared to life yesterday. It’s had been sitting while the trailer was being built and had refused to start. We ended up draining all the fuel, rebuilding the fuel pump and thoroughly cleaning the carburetor.  We also mounted a steerable tail wheel.  Still no sign of the ballistic parachute from the manufacture (10 months over due).

The engine and tail wheel.

Carbon tail wheel linkage mounting bracket

To build the giant stations and airships  we need to start testing the airbeam structures up high. This is a flight we’re planning to carry a 50 foot airbeam to 100,000 feet.

We’re calling the mission “High Beam”.

We just finished the power harness for the mobile quad. We put in a big 60 amp switch that selects between “shore power” and the battery. This way we can do all the preliminary checklist tests while plugged into the mission control van. Then we’ll switch to battery for the last page and the firing.

We’ve been packaging up the quad engine.  There is an awful lot of cables, boxes and plumping on this engine.  It would take too long to set all this up in the desert so the whole things is getting bolted down on a set of shelves.  We want to do the first fire test on our next mission.

The TV commercial for last week didn’t go through but two TV missions have popped up on the horizon. Both are about nine to twelve months out.

We are weighing and  juggling missions right now. Tandem needs one more piece of gear flight tested before it can go. We can do that in conjunction with the rocket launch flight or set up a quick half rack quick flight to take care of it. We’re looking at the dollars and the weather for the decision.

I’ve been dragging out the old stuff while we work on the new stuff.

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We started assembling two new high rack vehicles Saturday. We may have a commercial gig to fly in couple of weeks. We won’t know till a few days before if it’s a go or not. There’s no way we could build and test a vehicle in the one day before travel that we would have. So we decided to build up the high racks just in case. If they are not used for this job we’ll save them for the next. We almost need to change our motto to “JP Aerospace, TV Commercials at the Edge of Space”.

Due to the deeper cold we’re seeing at high altitude we’ve been upping the insulation on some systems. On the last missions we flew with an half inch extra foam wrap around the primary position telemetry system. It was a significant improvement.

The commercial gig will rearrange our schedule a bit. If it’s a go we can test the modification to the balloon release system at the same time.  If it checks out then Tandem will be the next mission. If we don’t do the commercial gig then we have two other high racks being prepped to test the release system as well and another test on the rocket launch control system.

Triple junction solar cells tested at 107,000 feet.

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If you left a comment in the last week, please repost it.  The problem ended up being a corrupt sql database.  Finally all is well.