On Sunday Away 123 carried it’s payloads to the edge of space and back. The recovery team picked up the vehicle five hours after landing and the entire team is home safe and sound. Away 123 was our 188th mission.
Away 123 in the air.
Away 123 looking back at the launch site just after take off.
On the way up.
Away 123 up top.
Away 123 is ready to flight. This will be our 188th mission.
We roll to the desert in the morning for a setup. Liftoff is Sunday Morning.
PongSat Mission Patch! This beautiful patch helps PongSats keep flying. At Amazon:http://a.co/d2oVqEt
The weather looks good, winds aloft are low. We are go for a run to 100,000 feet this weekend. The vehicle is Away 123.
This will be our 188th mission.
We completed Ascender 9 outer envelope. It was time to inflate it and see if we sewed it right. Our next step is to mount the truss structure.Then it will be on to installing inner lift cells, and all the plumbing. The motors go on at the end.
It also was our first real work in the new building.
Away 123 has been scheduled and rescheduled. The weather has been making us just a bit crazy.
Away 123 is now on for June 25th. It will carry PongSats, MiniCubes, ATO experiments, a helium release valve and six cameras.
We’ve completed the outer envelope of the Ascender 9 airship. We’re hoping to do a first inflation test Wednesday night if the weather and parking lot allow.
Today the crew is sewing the last of the zippers in Ascender 9. There are a lot of zippers in this thing. One nine foot nose zipper for inflation, six foot zippers on each tail, ten, two and a half foot along each keel and two six foot emergency egress zippers on each side.
The TransAtmospheric Ascender will be our first airship to reach space. The vehicle is 2100 feet long and will have a crew of three. It will have a peak altitude of 350,000 feet and a maximum velocity of Mach 5. Technically it is a hypersonic waverider. The TransAtmospheric Ascender is strictly a suborbital vehicle. It will fly from a Block 2 Dark Sky Station floating at 120,000 feet to space then return to the station. The airship will be driven by a single four chamber version of our symphony hybrid chemical/electric rocket engine.
The TransAtmospheric Ascender is still a few years away but as we get closer the design starts to firm up. Just thought you would like a look at where it stands.
