JustinHamel.com

Launch 6 was a learning experience.

We always seem to learn something when we launch one of these balloons. One of our goals was to launch at dawn so we could catch the funky colors in the sunrise. We did manage to meet that goal.

We also physically oriented the camera to look more downward this time. This resulted most of the 3500 photos capturing the ground and nothing more.

Thank you to the couple that helped us retrieve our payload from their property.

Stay tuned. HD video is in the works for launch 7.

[View with PicLens]

Goal:
We will be launching extra early in the morning. Our hope is to capture the sun emerging from behind the earth as well as view the earth in the twilight.

Inventory:
1000 gram balloon – http://scientificsales.com
Parachute (5 foot diameter) – http://www.the-rocketman.com/recovery.html
Payload container – styrofoam container
Camera – Canon A470
GPS tracking unit – http://findmespot.com/en/index.php
Hydrogen and gas bottle – http://www.airgas.com

Launch location:
Salem/Silverton, Oregon

Launch Date:
Dawn. June 5. (I had previously listed June 6th as the launch date. That was an error.)

Live tracking:
http://share.findmespot.com/shared/faces/viewspots.jsp?glId=0X17QV4bizm3CekLSah0SbqcGX50eg8S7

Success!
We launched about 10 miles south of Grass Valley, Oregon. The balloon and payload traveled in the expected direction, but ended up traveling farther that we anticipated. We had to spend the night in Pendleton, Oregon, and the next morning we climbed/hiked up a mountain that sits on an Indian Reservation to retrieve the payload.

We found the payload, and about 3 minutes into looking at some of the pictures, we spotted a cougar that had been stalking us from a distance. We had some blow horns, so we made a lot of noise and it took off.

When we were heading back down the mountain, there was a bear and its cub hanging out right where we needed to go. We ended up singing Row Your Boat 5 thousand times very loudly while stomping our feet down the mountain to make the bears aware of our presence. They ended up steering clear of us and we made it safely down the mountain.

It was quite an experience.

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Project goal:
To launch a weather balloon that lifts our payload to 130,000 feet, capture still photos of the earth throughout the entire flight, and recover the payload safely back on earth.

This launch is a “redo” or launch 4.

Inventory:
3000 gram balloon – http://kaymont.com
Parachute (5 foot diameter) – http://www.the-rocketman.com/recovery.html
Payload container – styrofoam container
Camera – Canon A470
GPS tracking unit – http://findmespot.com/en/index.php
Altimeter – Garmin ETrex Venture HC
Hydrogen and gas bottle – http://www.airgas.com

Launch location:
Grass Valley, OR

Launch Date:
The morning of Sunday, April 18th.

Live tracking:
(Link removed)

Donations:
Thanks again to everyone who donated to our project.

Launch failure.

You know when NASA rockets blow up on the launch pad? Yeah.. it happens to everybody. The wind was blowing so hard that we couldn’t control the balloon. The balloon ended up floating free without the gear attached.

Oh well. We’re going to try again in Launch 5.

Project goal:
To launch a weather balloon that lifts our payload to 130,000 feet, capture still photos of the earth throughout the entire flight, and recover the payload safely back on earth.

Proposed Inventory:
3000 gram balloon – http://kaymont.com
Parachute (5 foot diameter) – http://www.the-rocketman.com/recovery.html
Payload container – to be determined
Camera – Canon A470
GPS tracking unit – http://findmespot.com/en/index.php
Altimeter – Garmin ETrex Venture HC
Hydrogen and gas bottle – http://www.airgas.com

Launch location:
Government Camp

Launch Date:
The morning of Saturday, April 10th.

Live tracking:
http://share.findmespot.com/shared/faces/viewspots.jsp?glId=0lu9nX3ZhbJbvQITqvOr9Sy8upzqmcaHj

Donations:
Thank you so much to everyone that has donated to our project. Since April 1st we have raised a total of $266. It’s extremely exciting to know that friends, family, and even complete strangers are enthusiastic about our projects. If you would still like to donate to our project, please visit our Kickstarter project page. There are incentives for donating.

Updates:
We have ordered the new and improved Spot II GPS tracking unit.
We have ordered the 3000 gram balloon.
We are looking for a hydrogen regulator that will mate to a 200 cu ft bottle of hydrogen.

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.

Project goal:
To launch a weather balloon that lifts our payload to 100,000 feet, shoot video of the earth from 100,000 feet, and recover the payload safely back on earth.

Inventory:
1200 gram balloon – http://scientificsales.com
Parachute – http://www.the-rocketman.com/recovery.html
Payload container – to be determined
GPS tracking unit – http://findmespot.com/en/index.php
JVC Everio digital camcorder - http://www.jvc.com
Helium and gas bottle – http://www.airgas.com

Launch location:
We are going to launch from Sweet Home, Oregon at 10 am.

Launch Date:
We will be launching on Wednesday, November 11, 2009.

Tracking:
To track the payload as it travels across Oregon, please visit this link: http://share.findmespot.com/shared/gogl.jsp?glId=0gMU2y5oAuaFa75MC5ftrsdD21RUy8h8Q

Proposed Flight path:
We think that the balloon/payload will travel along the path shown below:

MISSION SUCCESS!
This mission was a complete success. We are in complete shock over the pictures that our digital camera captured during the flight. You can view them below. If you would like to see how we prepared for this mission, please visit Near Space Adventure: Flight 2.

Special thanks:
We would like to thank a number of people who helped make this flight a success:

1. Our families
2. Our friends
3. Jeff Smith at Airgas
4. The kind family who allowed us to launch from their property and helped us tremendously with the launch preparations.

Other thoughts:
It’s obvious by looking at the photos that we finally reached our goals. Not only did we definitely reach 100k feet, but we also managed to photograph the earth from an altitude that really allows the viewer to see the curvature of our beautiful earth.

We approached this opportunity to launch thinking that we had tied up every lose end. In reality, we learned some lessons the hard way. Example: Launching in the rain is not pleasant, and water-saturated objects such as parachutes weigh more than normal.

Flight pictures:
We have an unbelievable amount of photos from the “edge of space.” I’m still at a loss for words over these pictures. The quality of these photos has been adjusted for easy web viewing. If you would like a full-quality print, please comment below, and I will contact you. Enjoy!

[View with PicLens]

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Flight path:

Project goal:
To launch a weather balloon that lifts our payload to 100,000 feet, and recover the payload safely back on earth.

Introduction:
On October 10, 2009 we launched a weather balloon from the Oregon coast with the goal of sending our payload to 100,ooo feet. We didn’t reach our goal, so we went back to the drawing board to improve upon our theories and methods. We believe that we have substantially more information than what we collected for the first attempt. Now we intend to launch another weather balloon with the same goals in mind.

If this is your first time reading, I highly encourage you to read the original project post and the results from the first launch as there is a lot of data that will not be repeated in this post.

Inventory:
1500 gram balloon – http://kaymont.com
Parachute – http://www.the-rocketman.com/recovery.html
Payload container – http://www.mrboxonline.com/8x6x425-small-foam-coolers-p-675.html
GPS tracking unit – http://findmespot.com/en/index.php
Canon A470 digital camera – http://chdk.wikia.com/wiki/A470
JVC Everio digital camcorder - http://www.jvc.com
Helium and gas bottle – http://www.airgas.com

Inventory notes:

1. We now intend to use a 1500 gram balloon.
2. We plan to add a digital video camera to the payload so that we can capture the entire flight.
3. Our payload is going to carry some artwork that will be exposed to the upper atmosphere at the request of the artist.

Expected launch date:
We will be launching on October 31, at 9 am. We are 100% sure that we are going to launch from (link removed).

Please come to our launch! I know that there are people who are following this blog that I have never met. Whether you are a friend, or a friend of a friend, coworker, or a meteorologist that wants to put us on TV…Everyone is invited.

I will be sure to post the address and the schedule for the launch prior to the launch date.

Launch data:
Our friends at EOSS (eoss.org) told us about a program called Liftwin. Liftwin is a program that calculates ballooning data based on input. So we can use this program to determine how we should go about achieving our current and future ballooning goals.

Unfortunately, Liftwin only runs on Windows 9.x operating systems (Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME).

To resolve this issue, I installed Sun VirtualBox. VirtualBox is a program that allows you to run an operating system within your existing operating system. Simply put, Windows 98 runs inside of its own window just like other programs do. VirtualBox is also cross-platform compatible, so Mac and Linux users can run it. This also means that Windows users can install Mac OSX or Linux in VirtualBox and run both at the same time.

I purposely blurred my desktop.

Since the weather always changes, it’s best to have multiple possible launch locations. Below is an example of what I think is the most plausible flight scenario based on the weather information that is available. We don’t want our payload to land in an area where it will be inaccessible. Farmland seems to be the best landing area.

Launch: Salem, OR -- Landing: Bend, OR

This particular flight path is based on the weather data for Oct. 20, 2009. If we could replicate this flight path on launch day, I would be extremely excited. We could take amazing photos and video from 60k-90k feet while traveling over the Three Sisters mountains.

UPDATES:

1. We are launching on October 31, 2009.
2. Instead of a 1200 gram balloon, we are going to launch a 1500 gram balloon. The 1500 gram balloon will be very large.