What’s Happening at JPA

PongSats from the Away 70 Mission getting a bit of zero gee on descent.

We inflated and inspected both port and starboard Ascender 90 envelopes today. It went very well. The 90 is getting some major upgrades.

PongSat made it as one of the best Kickstarter projects of 2012!

http://www.kickstarter.com/year/2012#space

We’ve signed up the 10,000th PongSat. It will be flying next April along with over a thousand others.

I think we may have flown more student payloads than the entire rest of the planet put together.  The April mission is full and we are signing up PongSats for an October 12th 2013 mission. We already have 300 PongSats signed up for that one!

Here the link to the great NBC PongSat story:

http://dailynightly.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/12/11/15848691-learn-more-about-jp-aerospace?threadId=3636612&commentId=73213770#c73213770

Last September we flew wedding rings for our friend Kota and his Bride.

These flights make our explorations real to real people out there in the real world.

JP

Here’s twelve minutes boiled down from thirty-two hours of footage. On September 29, 2012 we flew six vehicle in one day. Five of them carried just over 1200 PongSats.

Away 75 in the sun and very above it all.

We’ve done two test firings of the new unit.

In addition to the new core design we’ve done a lot of small upgrades. The data system has gone from 9 to 12 volts (it’s amazing how many things this fixed). The probe connections are now all on one side of the MHD core. The rubber motor seals have gone back to the old style and there is a new data harness.

To making testing easier we’ve built the little red wagon test stand!