White Star Balloons Amateur Atlantic Flight

March 24, 2011 2:53 PM

White Star Balloons Amateur Atlantic Flight
Tonight, Thursday, at 8pm EDT (0000 Fri UTC), in Spaceport, Indiana, White Star Balloons will launch a robotic balloon up into the jet stream, hoping to be the first amateur team to ever fly a small balloon all the way across the Atlantic Ocean and land it on the other side--whether that be Europe, Africa, or points east. No amateur team has ever done this. The farthest amateur flight so far sank 200 miles short of Ireland in 2008. Join us for the launch tonight and track the flight for the next three days! With a little help from Metafilter, I wrote and designed an identification label message for the balloon in sixteen different languages.

Role: translator

posted by sunnichka (4 comments total)

Oh my god this is cool! I love balloon projects and I really hate that I'm not in Indiana anymore to go to the launch.
posted by ChrisHartley at 6:48 PM on March 24, 2011

Live video feed.
posted by ChrisHartley at 7:03 PM on March 24, 2011

Cool!
posted by ph00dz at 6:26 AM on March 25, 2011

They canceled the launch around midnight:

Launch scrubbed, problems with HF gps lock and sat modem not hearing satellites. Will fix and launch at soonest opportunity

It was high drama watching the live feed and participating on the IRC channel. This should be a FPP for sure when they launch. At this point with the fading jetstream the projections were putting them in north Africa - floating a robotic balloon in to the no-fly zone in Libya would be interesting and I suppose that is what the remote cut-down mechanism is for.

The HF transmitter on the balloon is on 7.102Mhz USB and there are several online receivers: w4ax.com (WebSDR in Atlanta) and Lexington #1 (non-SDR) where it should be possible to hear the DominoEX 16 and RTTY transmissions as it floats up and away.
posted by ChrisHartley at 6:34 AM on March 25, 2011 [1 favorite]