NSL-31

On October 4th, 2014 we conducted a launch at the Fox50 Family Fest event at the American Tobacco Campus.

Our payload was a simple cardboard box, that allowed the kids to decorate it before launch. We had a tail (fin) on the payload as well for more decorations. The payload included:

  • Mobius camera looking out the 'front' of the payload.

  • 808 #16-D camera out on the tail. It has a wide angle lens and was mounted on its side and tipped up 45 degrees so that it could record from the payload all the way up to the balloon. And the IR filter was removed so that it could record more things in the IR range.

  • 808 #16-B camera INSIDE the payload. It was looking out a window as well as looking at an old iPhone that was playing videos we made with the visitors to the booth.

  • AP510 APRS tracker with high altitude mod.

  • Spot tracker as a backup

We had close quarters for launch and came very close to the building.

The star of the flight was Space Ducky on his second flight. We sent him up to 91,000 feet.
(The Family Fest event includes racing hundreds of these rubber ducks down a man-made river.)

View from the 'front' Mobius

View from the internal video playback camera

The jet stream decided to visit us for this flight, so we had a nice LONG flight and it traveled over 100mph for much of the trip. At one point it's ground speed exceeded 131mph ! We believed that we were filling the balloon with 99% pure Helium, but it appears to have been partly air.

Most of the latex balloon did not detach/disintegrate at burst and hung around dangerously close to the parachute during descent. In the final 3700' of descent, this latex fouled the chute and the payload fell like... well... a big cardboard box -- it impacted at 30mph. All of this was caught on video from the IR-heavy fin camera.

The tangled parachute and 600g balloon

The ducky visiting the swamp after landing

Attempt #3: Paul had his waders for the swamp, but Lucas only needed some plastic bags and duct tape to complete his swamp recovery wardrobe

Shortly after launch, Chris and Lucas left the event and headed out to the recovery site. Due to the flight's speed, there was no way that they could witness the landing. Here is the start of the recovery story recounted by Chris G:

Undaunted, we set off: it was only about 600 feet into the woods, per reports from Mission Control. Unfortunately, starting from this particular edge of the field, it was 600 feet of thicket and brambles. The recovery team quickly formed opinions as to which pointy plants we liked better than others, as the recovery area was adjacent to the place where they keep ALL the pointy plants in Virginia. (For the record: Green briars aren't too bad, blackberry brambles are really nasty, and I almost willingly jumped off a stump into a holly tree instead of climbing through another thicket of brambles--I probably would have if I was sure of the depth of the water below it.)
The good news was we got close and recorded exact landing coordinates from the APRS, which was still screaming away. The bad news was, we never did make it to the payload, and couldn't lay eyes on the box or the parachute. We had to abort and exit the woods before it got too dark. All we took home was four shoes full of the finest black Virginia swamp mud and probably about half a pound of thorns and sticks still attached to us by the time we got in the car.

The number of significant digits from APRS meant that the payload could only be narrowed down to an area about 35m x 45m. Searching this overgrown area was very difficult. The following day, Paul tried to recover it but failed.

Several days later, Lucas and Paul again returned to the site and finally found it.

Given these issues, the flight prediction was amazing! Have you ever seen a prediction (yellow 100 cu ft gas) so closely match the actual flight (blue)? The two were under a mile or so of each other for the entire flight.