My first attempt to launch a high-altitude balloon ended in disappointment.
In doing research for this first mission, I was greatly concerned with winds aloft. The very first flight prediction I ran back in early December predicted that if launched from just west of Richmond, Virginia, the payload would float down by parachute for a lovely landing... in the Atlantic, 50 miles off the coast of the DelMarVa peninsula. Since one of my mission objectives was to make a complete recovery of the payload(s), I decided to move the launch further west and south. My family already had associations with Lynchburg, and with E.C. Glass High School in particular, so that seemed like a natural jumping off point.
I had been building and tweaking and testing for several months, and finally felt ready to pick a launch window. The week of February 5 through 12 seemed harmless enough, with no family or work commitments in conflict. I monitored winds aloft for another month and a half, running flight predictions on an almost daily basis. Nearly every prediction had the payload landing safely inland within the state of Virginia when launched from Lynchburg. This gave strong support to my decision to launch there. A few of the predictions were still alarming (including one that was almost 300 miles downrange), so I would still need to be careful of the upper-level winds. As February approached, I kept my eyes on the winds aloft predictions, hoping for conditions that would route the vicious Jet Stream winds away from central Virginia.
To my surprise and delight, exactly such a break presented itself. On Monday, January 30, I spotted a ripple in the Jet Stream that was moving eastward. Behind this 750-mile southerly loop of howling wind lay a narrow patch of almost complete calm. This curl in the Jet Stream was headed over the Pacific Northwest, working its way toward Virginia. As I monitored this pattern over the next few days, it stayed organized and held together, with a predicted path that would carry the bubble of calm high-altitude air right over central Virginia, right at the beginning of my launch window. The timing was perfect too - a Sunday, which would allow (most of) the folks who were interested to participate.
The final preparations were fast and furious. I spent two very long days laying out and tying rope harnesses, purchasing helium, soldering extra radio-to-PC cables, and generally pulling my hair out. The morning of the launch (Sunday, February 5, 2006), as we set out for the launch site, my wife asked several times about the wind. The forecast was for a blustery day around Richmond, which seemed to be in conflict with my predictions. I told her not to worry, that the wind we really needed to worry about was at about 35,000 feet.
We met up with some family members, and set up our launch operation on the side lawn of E.C. Glass High School. This site was not as open to the sky as I had hoped. The lawn was ringed on three sides with tall oak trees, but the gusty wind was blowing directly toward an open patch of sky. The startup of the electronics was troublesome (the GPS software wasn't working), but the filling of the balloon began smoothly.
As the balloon began to fill, though, it started to act like a six-foot spherical sail, and bounced and bobbed vigorously in the wind. Even worse, it began to spin and twist unpredictably. As we started closing in on a full load of helium, one particularly nasty gust of wind spun the balloon hard several times, twisting the balloon closed right above the neck. This blocked the helium still rushing in from the tank and formed a bubble where the neck met the round part of the balloon. The pressure in the bubble was too much for the latex - frigid helium began pouring out of a series of small holes that had torn in the bottom of the body of the balloon. With no way to repair the balloon or to transfer the helium to another balloon, the mission was effectively over.
In frustration, I took a pocket knife and cut the body of the balloon free of the neck. I expected it to whirl and bounce around the lawn like a party balloon. Instead, we watched in stunned silence as it slowly drifted up over the city of Lynchburg, gently rolling side-to-side, as though it were a giant eyeball looking down at the city as it floated soundlessly away. A few minutes later it was at a couple of thousand feet, still climbing slowly and steadily into the sky, the two-foot-wide hole in the bottom barely visible. If anyone found the empty carcass in their yard, perhaps near Charlottesville, please accept my apologies for littering.
In the end, the day was actually a very good learning experience. Since the payloads never got off the ground, no equipment was lost. The balloon ($75) and helium (another $75) were consumables anyway, so this was about the least expensive failure we could have had.
Special thanks go out to my dad Jim Marshall for his invaluable assistance on the ground and his sage advice, my (now ex-)wife Mona for her invaluable logistics, catering, planning, and moral support, to brother Pat for his card-playing expertise, and to son Zachary for being patient and helping in small ways. Today's adventure would not have been possible without you!!