We've been flying experiments and payloads for students researcher to the edge of space for almost a decade.
We've flown over 3,400 of them for nearly 10,000 students. A lot of the news articles about the new suborbital vehicle say out right that access to high altitude flight has never been done before. Experimenting where no experiments have gone before, well, except for experiments
conducted by eight year olds. They put there experiments into ping pong balls and we fly them to 100,000 feet for free. We call them PongSats. People use them for everything from plant seeds for student inspiration all the way to university class research.The new guys go higher but the environment at 20 miles is basically the same as the one at 63 miles.
Not everybody likes PongSats; I've had NASA officials
tell me PongSats are of no importance because they are round and too small, big universities
tell me PongSats aren't meaningfully because they are free. Yet none of
that stops the thousand of researches using the program.
All the new space planes and rockets are pretty cool.
I just hope the scientists using them can catch up to the eight year olds.
http://www.jpaerospace.com/
JP
Slashdot Mirror
We've been flying experiments and payloads for students researcher to the edge of space for almost a decade. We've flown over 3,400 of them for nearly 10,000 students. A lot of the news articles about the new suborbital vehicle say out right that access to high altitude flight has never been done before. Experimenting where no experiments have gone before, well, except for experiments conducted by eight year olds. They put there experiments into ping pong balls and we fly them to 100,000 feet for free. We call them PongSats. People use them for everything from plant seeds for student inspiration all the way to university class research.The new guys go higher but the environment at 20 miles is basically the same as the one at 63 miles. Not everybody likes PongSats; I've had NASA officials tell me PongSats are of no importance because they are round and too small, big universities tell me PongSats aren't meaningfully because they are free. Yet none of that stops the thousand of researches using the program. All the new space planes and rockets are pretty cool. I just hope the scientists using them can catch up to the eight year olds. http://www.jpaerospace.com/ JP
How about hauling the entire rig up to 140,000 feet?
The tech for this would be big, but nothing imposible.
JP
www.jpaerospace.com
How about giant inflated defector shields? JP www.jpaerospace.com