Near Space Adventure: Flight 3 – Post Flight
by admin on Nov.23, 2009, under Technical
Mission Failure
We launched from an elementary school playground. What we know is that instead of gaining serious altitude, the balloon and payload achieved neutral buoyancy and drifted for hundreds of miles inside of a rain cloud. After many frustrating hours of watching the GPS pings come in, the balloon and payload finally ascended to near space. Unfortunately, our video camera was only capable of shooting two hours of video.
We did retrieve the payload, but the video footage only showed the guts of a rain cloud.
This was a learning experience for us, so we do not view it as a total failure. In the future, we will schedule our launches like NASA. If someone even thinks it’s going to rain, the launch gets postponed. 
I do believe that we are going to launch again in the spring.
