What’s Happening at JPA

We can almost see the end of the new launch bag project. A couple more weeks and the sewing will be done, for now….

The team made two new controller boxes for the next three high rack missions. The old ones got a bit thrashed on the landings of the Toshiba commercial flights.

We’ve begun upgrading our flight computers. For the past six years we’ve been using Parallax’s Basic Stamp series. Over the next year we’ll be moving systems over to Parallax’s Propeller computer. It’s an eight way parallel processor on a chip. It will give us a great deal more speed and flexibility in our flight controllers. We waited on the processor upgrade until we got the major telemetry system upgrade complete. The next Away mission will have a least one Propeller processor on board.

The “desktop” quad engine is slowly coming together. This weekend we built the 300 watt plasma antenna. We spent about two hours trying to tune it. After much frustration we discover that the antenna was fine and one of our meters was uncalibrated. We only tested it a 70 watts. Our big amplifier is still at the repair shop (it was smoking right out of the box). Today we struggled with the connector nightmare on the oxidizer side of the engine. The regulators, flashback arrestors, servo valves and other plumbing not only all have different thread sizes but different unit standards and even different thread direction. Everything is actually design not to fit together. This is for safety. You don’t want to hook a fuel line to an oxygen tank for example. However, since there are no hybrid/plasma engines plumbing parts out there you end up cobbling bits together from other disciplines. The result is that everything needs an adapter. One the second generation engine we’ll make custom fittings, however now it’s hair pulling time.

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Away 42 was the last of the Toshiba Chair flights.

Ed building the base of the upgraded crew module mock up.

Drew cutting foam squares that will be then be hot wired into to disks. The disks are part of the end caps for air beams for the new Dark Sky Station and Jelly Fish balloon. On the table next to him is the core of the first test quad engine.

Anthony is busy making a second set of mini rocket launch boxes for an upcoming Away mission.

Paul diligently sewing weight pockets for the tandem launch bag.

We picked up the Sky Pup last month in South Carolina. After an epic drive ahead of all the blizzards she’s now in the JPA shop. The Sky Pup service several purposes: spotter plane, training vehicle and research tool. She has an all foam structure cover in aircraft fabric. Prefect for JPA! The design has many high strength, extreme light weight aspects that bear study. She cruses at 55mph and this model has been flown to 18,000 feet.

We’re building a hard deck on the top of the wing to add a ballistic parachute, installing a altimeter and a tail wheel.

Jean Justeau has been a JPA team member for over 26 years.  Jean is the artist in resident of the Dark Sky Station. This beautiful work is called Ascender Rising.

Just what we do on Saturdays.

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Here’s the basic structures for Away 43, 44 and 45.  Two of these high racks are destine for another TV commercial and the third is for a small rocket launch system.  All will be PongSat carriers.

Today we’re putting carbon edges on ten foam decks. These are going into five high racks, our standard platform. We’re starting to build vehicles in small production runs instead of one at a time. I can’t wait till we start doing that with Ascenders.

Things are getting a bit crazy. There are twenty internal projects currently underway and two commercial flights on deck.

Here is a set of sketches of some of the projects. It’s a real mix, systems, experiments and vehicles. A few are complete and waiting for flight, some have already been flown and are being upgraded, some have six months to go. They all have been started and have real hardware in the shop.