KHS National Technical Honor Society (NTHS) recently started a new initiative called Project Horizon. The project was born from a brainstorming session about possible projects to undertake. We soon followed this session with the intention of developing a Cube-Sat, a miniature satellite that can support multiple interesting data collection devices. These Cube-Sats are developed by High Schools, and usually launched by NASA space vehicles.

Unfortunately, collaboration programs with NASA are very competitive and can cost up to $4000-$5000. Due to financial constraints and high levels of competition, we decided that the NASA Cube-Sat initiative was not an endeavour we would be able to support. With our perseverance and determination, we explored alternate ideas to send our experiments into the upper rim of the atmosphere. Due to our overwhelming enthusiasm, we often found ourselves with too many interesting endeavors to pursue, leading many members researching in separate objectives. Because of this, the team spent a short while brainstorming and waiting until one idea triumphed, and one did indeed.

One of our mentors mentioned something he found very interesting, high altitude balloons; the team was in an immediate uproar of support. We did not have any idea of what a high altitude balloon was, but with perseverance and determination we confidently set out to learn. We experienced a decrease in team cohesiveness once development of experiments began, which languished once we dedicated more time to planning. After determining a solid deadline and careful planning, we completed the design process - or so we thought.

To our dismay, we discovered that some essential tasks had not been completed by launch day, delaying our launch by about two hours. This was of great concern because we had set the launch time in stone with the German Air Traffic Control Company. Once we launched our High Altitude Balloon, the whole team was relieved. Shortly after launch, we relaxed at a cafe and enjoyed lunch next to a beautiful castle, which was also caught by the cameras in the HAB. In our previous calculations, we had estimated that the HAB’s flight time would be about four hours. We were shocked when we found that, according to our spot tracker, the HAB had landed after a mere two hours.

We would later discover that our spot tracker was malfunctioning, and giving us false data. Confused, we pursued the signal given to us by the spot tracker, as it rapidly oscillated its signal from 0ft to 30,000ft. Under these circumstances, we were forced to search for the HAB without any reliable information regarding its location. After multiple hours of searching for our treasured HAB, and without reliable information, it was all in vain, and we were forced to return empty handed and discouraged. Fortunately, we had a final failsafe in the event that the spot tracker failed to help us. We had physically written our contact information on the payload attached to the HAB. This mechanism proved far more effective than the spot tracker.

We eventually received a call from a German citizen who had found our HAB in his backyard, which our sponsor rushed to retrieve. However, our work was not yet complete. We still had to determine what went wrong with the spot tracker, and interpret all of the data collected in the flight. In this flight report we have compiled all of the errors made in this launch and intend to improve upon our design in the next iteration of Project Horizon: Raider II.