[NLRS] ND Baloon Launch

[goverby at charter.net]

This was sent to an ad-hoc list of folks who fly rockets near Fargo.  I think
some on this list will be interested in this.  I wish I'd have known the time
and frequencies to see if I could have picked up the baloon from here.

How big of a target is needed to reflect 10ghz signals?

Glen, KC0IYT

From: "Kevin Rezac" <krezac at ieas.org>
To: (removed)
Subject: Rocket launch... well, not really....
Date: Sat, 25 Sep 2004 19:41:44 -0500

Hi all,

I've got to make a judgement call here and since the ground still is 
really muddy, since very few show up for a Sunday launch anyway, and 
since I'm just plain tired and sore and don't have anything ready to fly 
anyway, I'm not going to hold a launch tomorrow. I promise that we'll 
get one in during mid-October. That'll give me some time to do repairs.

The reason I'm tired is that today I got to take part in a high-altitude 
balloon launch with Paul Seifert. It was fantastically cool, and if 
anyone is interested you may want to work one in to your schedule. We 
started out leaving town at 5:00am for a launch site south of Valley 
City. The stars in the sky are wonderful in the country at 6:00am. We 
got set up and filled the balloon. Party balloons are just not the same 
as this 15 foot monster. We prepped the electronics payloads and had 
some issues with one of the tracking systems, but since we had two 
others working properly the third was just for testing anyway. Still 
functioning was a still camera and a temprature sensor. Liftoff occured 
at 8:30am, the sun shining in our faces. It was neat watching the 
balloon lift away from the site, much like a rocket but way slower. The 
telemetry was live, so we could watch the computer and see the distance, 
direction, and altitude from our position. About 5 minutes after liftoff 
we piled into our two vehicles for the chase. We ended up driving only 
about 30 miles south of our launch site, stopping a couple of times 
along the way for visual, which was easily seen in the bright blue sky. 
We ended up on Lisbon, ND for probably more than half an hour watching 
the balloon climb through 70,000 feet.... 80,000 feet.... 90,000 
feet....  Yes, it was easy to see! The balloon at ground pressure was 
only about 15 feet wide, but at 90,000 feet was probably 40 feet in 
diameter! It was truly awesome being able to see the balloon and watch 
it knowing it was 18 miles straight up. With our two telemetry units 
reporting, one just over 100,000 feet and one just under, the balloon 
burst. Some were watching at the moment of burst, and it was described 
as looking like a flash of powder. Telemetry then reported it was 
falling.... fast. We watched the reports for a few more minutes, seeing 
it descend through 60,000 feet before starting the chase. The payload 
had a 7 foot parachute, but there's no air up there to inflate it! We 
started to see it slowing down around 50,000 feet, and it was still 
coming straight down. It did drift around about a mile or two on the way 
down, but was found very close to the vertical center of apogee. 
Recovery was easy with the telemetry, but still involved a half mile 
walk across the field. The local land owners were quite interested in 
what we were doing, and even took our recovery group photo and gave us a 
ride back to our cars.

We found out from the temprature sensor that it got down to 5 degrees 
above zero inside our insulated payload at 100,000 feet, and 80 below on 
the outside. I can't wait to see the pictures from the camera. And I got 
to fly my GPS up to 100,000 feet and get it back. It was all very cool, 
and I can't wait to do it again.

Kevin Rezac