Category Archives: Near Space

JP Aerospace tests Ascender airship

June 18, 2015 TopSpacer

JP Aerospace, “America’s OTHER Space Program“, has been out flying their high altitude airships again, including an Ascender prototype:

* Ascender 26 Flies!

Sunday June 14th our 26 foot Ascender airship took to the sky in Northern Nevada. This vehicle is smaller than some of our other vehicles, but it is extremely important. It is a test bed for an entire new internal structure and new internal helium cell interface. It was intended to be a short hop to 1000 feet above the ground. However everything was going so well we let her run and flew to 2585 feet above the ground (6,708 feet above sea level. We had the combination inner cell fill volumes and balance off by about six ounces and we floated tail up about twenty degrees most of the way. It slowed the climb rate a bit but didn’t detract from an excellent flight.

The Ascender is a pretty complex system with four helium inner cells, servo control vents, an out envelope pressurization system, a carbon truss internal structure, full unlink command and tracking system and independent backup gas release systems. The real value of this test flight was learning to deploy this complex of a system in the field. We still have goose bumps on how great the flight went. This is the vehicle that paves the way for the next generation of Ascenders to come.

*Away 117 Reaches 95,874 feet (29222 meters) –

Away 117 was our 180th flight. The flight carried magnetohydrodynamic experiments for the ATO project, a PongSat from Singapore and a slot machine for Soboba Casino.

The flight was a great success. We have a challenging recovery operation. It took four hours of off road driving and a twelve hour hike/climb up and down a mountain but we got it back.

Education, Near Space, Space Science

“Classroom Laboratory at the Edge of Space” – new book about Mini-Cubes

May 18, 2015 TopSpacer 2 Comments

Gregory Cecil has released his first book, Classroom Laboratory at the Edge of Space: Introducing the Mini-Cube Program.

A book written for secondary public and private school STEM instructors, home schooling, and undergraduate STEM courses of study explaining how to set up their own student focused “space program” utilizing the Mini-Cube Program. With this STEM Project Based Learning Activity, students can have the unique, affordable, and challenging opportunity to send experiments via high altitude balloon to an altitude of 100,000 feet (20 miles or 32 km), commonly known as the “edge of space.”

Utilizing the scientific method, team work, research, and communicating in writing the results and applications for peer review, students will participate in the full cycle of an actual experiment from the original question to the published results and conduct true science at the edge of space.

It is currently available in Kindle format and he says a print copy will be released in a few weeks.

JP Aerospace flies Mini-Cube payloads to Near Space via their high altitude air ships.

Education, Near Space

HASP (High Altitude Student Payload) brought back near space infrasound

May 17, 2015 TopSpacer

The High Altitude Student Payload (HASP) is a high altitude balloon system

designed to carry up to twelve student payloads to an altitude of about 36 kilometers with flight durations of 15 to 20 hours using a small volume, zero pressure balloon. It is anticipated that the payloads carried by HASP will be designed and built by students and will be used to flight-test compact satellites or prototypes and to fly other small experiments.

A launch of a HASP payload in 2013:

The program, sponsored by NASA and the Louisiana Space Consortium, seeks

to foster student excitement in an aerospace career path and to help address workforce development issues in this area. HASP plans to provide a “space test platform” to encourage student research and stimulate the development of student satellite payloads and other space-engineering products. By getting the students involved with every aspect of the program HASP hopes to fill the gap between and student built sounding balloons and satellites, while also enhancing the technical skills and research abilities of the students.

One experiment on a flight in 2014 measured very low frequency sound waves, referred to as infrasound, at high altitudes for the first time in decades: Eerie ‘X-Files’ Sounds Recorded From the Edge of Space – Discovery News

Here is a sampling of what they recorded:

Here’s the caption to the video:

Infrasound recorded on a high altitude balloon during the 2014 HASP flight. The balloon floated at approximately 22 miles above sea level for 5.6 hours, travelling about 450 miles in the process. The research was featured in articles on Live Science and the Huffington Post as well as featured on the BBC and National Public Radio.

The sound has been sped up 100 times in order to bring it into the audible range. The original clip featured in the media was sped up by 1000x (see the video “Infrasound in the Stratosphere II), and thus had less audible detail.

Near Space, Space films and videos, Space humor

Video: An X-Wing flies near space without a green screen

April 29, 2015 TopSpacer

Project Helium Tears takes an X-Wing fighter to the edge of space:

Near Space, Space business

JP Aerospace flies margaritas to edge of space

March 10, 2015 TopSpacer

JP Aerospace continues to find customers for high altitude commercials: Flying Margarita! – JP Aerospace Blog

JPA were tasked once again to show that space is for everybody! On National Margarita Day we send blenders, cameras and a particular famous mix to the edge of space.

The team travel to Arizona for this flight. Balloons were flown, margarita were mixed and frozen by the atmosphere itself and amazing video was created.

This brings our flight total to 176.