We are sending the names of all our supporter on Patreon to the edge of space. You can be there too.
Check it out! https://patreon.com/jpaerospace
What’s Happening at JPA
-
The List
Working the list. Yesterday the team worked on the Away 131 platform, an airship and the submarine (and some shop cleaning). Tackling giant projects: create the do to lists, break it up in to chunks, write it on the white board, cross it out, repeat.
-
Space Chair: The Micro Documentary
in 2009 JP Aerospace flew four chairs to the edge of space on high altitude balloons. This was a done for a TV commercial for Toshiba. This micro documentary chronicles this odd yet exhilarating chapter in commercial space.
The video: https://youtu.be/IO6j2ap1n3g
-
Airship to Orbit Animation
New video! This is an animation of the Airship to Orbit launch system with yours truly talking you through. This was originally for an episode about the program on the ‘Beyond Geek’ show. Give it a view:
-
Segmenented Block Firing Test, The Movie
We got some great footage of the Block 7 test. We put a short video together with the footage and explanations.
-
Flying Fox
YouTube has start a program called #Shorts. It’s for videos under 60 seconds in a phone format. Here’s our first one. (ed note:Music played by JP on a tinny piano in the old west in 1873 during a unfortunate time travel accident. Please forgive him.) -
Next Steps in Engine Development
Stack 4 of our core segments, side fed the O2, slide into our accelerator & mount MHD #115 on the end & you end up with a tiny test chemical/electric engine.
This isn’t going to push anything very fast but will generate a lot of data.
-
JPA on YouTube
Balloons, airships, submarines, rocket engines and other craziness. Checkout our YouTube channel!
https://www.youtube.com/user/johnmpowell/videos
-
New Balloon Burst Video
New Video! This is a 60 foot balloon bursting at 100,000 feet. This was filmed from the deck of the Away 92 mission. Remember to subscribe!
-
Plasma Engine Development
We have been developing a small acrylic/paraffin fuel block for use in our MHD (magnetohydrodynamic) research. The are made from stacked and chem welded acrylic plates instead of rods. This brings the costs way down. also the acrylic structure lets us see what’s going on inside. The first test was to see if it even held together. It worked great.
We’ve conducted seven firings. We’re now adding components and increasing internal pressure.Some of the new blocks were making are going in to plasma edit experiments and some are being stacking into a mini hybrid chemical/electric engine.
We run each for three minutes.
Segmented Test 1
Segmented Test 4
Segmented Test 5 layout
Test 5 paraffin plates
Test 5 with electodes
Test 5 firing 
Test 7 Test 7 was the first with potassium inclusions in the paraffin for increased ionization.
