What’s Happening at JPA

PongSats always get a few seconds of micro-gravity on descent.

These PongSats are aboard  Away 82 at 98,000 feet.

Five vehicles launched and five recover!  We flew just over 2000 PongSat student experiments, the most we’ve ever flown at once. All five launches were in winds that were steady 20 with gusts to 46 mph.

One landed on a mountain and took four days to recover, but all is well. More details soon.

In a few minutes we will be off to the desert. Tomorrow morning we will be flying five high altitude balloon missions.

On board will be over 2,000 PongSat student experiments, three MiniCubes, seven cameras, and piles of radio and satellite uplink systems. It looks like we’re facing a 70 to 90 mile recovery across the mud in the high Sierras.

Wish us luck!

Beyond Geek and been joining us on our adventures and has posted a great webisode!

The 10,000th PongSat will be flying to 100,000 feet on our April mission. This is a huge milestone for JP Aerospace.

The PongSat program is growing in orbit expanding leaps. We already have PongSat number 14,000 signed up for a flight this fall. While NASA is cutting back on it’s education out reach because of budget,  JPA intends not only to take up the slack but to keep escalating people participation to completely insane new heights.

If you haven’t heard of PongSat, it is our free payload flight program. Students put their experiment in a ping pong ball. They mail it to us, we fly them to 100,000 feet or higher on our balloons, airships and platforms. After the flight we mail their PongSat back. Over 35,000 people have participated. Participants range from kindergartners to university professors to artists.

PongSats are getting more sophisticated all the time.  On the next flight there will be PongSats with data loggers, mini video cameras and even one with it’s own GPS.

GPS PongSat

Our next mission is less than two weeks away and the PongSats are rolling in. We will be flying over 2,500 student experiments on this one.

Boxes of PongSats from around the world.

Check out the April of Popular Science. Last September we flew two business cards for editors.

They have a mention of the flight and a photo showing PongSats and MiniCubes (and a Lego Astronaut from England). We’re at the bottom of page 6.

Away 80 under construction. Away 80 will carry 420 PongSats on the April mission. She will be one of a fleet of six that will fly that day.