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8:02 am
April 3, 2010
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Luke Maurits
| | Adelaide, Australia | |
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Post edited 8:03 am – April 3, 2010 by Luke Maurits
Subject to the usual issues of making sure we wait until we have enough people and/or little enough other active projects to make sure we can handle it (I don't expect this to happen any time soon, I'm just putting the idea "down on paper"), I would love to see CSTART embark on some balloon based projects. No doubt everybody has seen the very many projects showing up on Reddit etc. these days about sending balloons "to the edge of space" (which is usually a gross exaggeration – the world record balloon altitude is 50 km, which is only half way to the edge of space!), so I expect most of you know what I'm talking about here.
Advantages of balloon based projects:
- Very cheap compared to rocket based projects,
- Much quicker construction time compared to rocket based projects,
- Much safter than rocket based projects,
- No ITAR issues.
These are all quite significant advantages, especially the quick construction time. If we had the money and a few members in the same place at the same time, a basic balloon project could readily be built and launched in under a week. A whole program of increasingly complex balloon launches could probably be achieved in around the same timeline as the OHKLA project.
Of course, the most important consideration is why we should be playing around with balloons at all. Some ideas:
- Photos of the Earth taken at high balloon altitudes look really awesome, could be great for propaganda.
- Photos of logos taken from high altitude balloons can be sold to raise funds (JP Aerospace do this: see here).
- Could be useful for testing equipment for use in space: 30-50 km up is not exactly LEO, but it must be a decent "first order approximation" with regard to certain factors: atmospheric pressure is at or below 1% of sea level, temperature is around -40 C and I am sure that various radiation levels must be higher too. Basically, anything which doesn't work at 50 km up isn't going to work in LEO, so balloon projects could provide a cheap "testing ground" for air tightness, thermal insulation, etc. Could also just be used to test stuff like communication links, navigation hardware and software, etc.
- Rockoons are an interesting idea. It looks like the idea was discounted prematurely when it first surfaced in the 1940s, but is undergoing a ressurgence now using more sophisticated and modern approaches. Lots of small projects/teams are working in this area now, like ARCA and JP Aerospace. The da Vinci Project X Prize entry was rockoon-based, too. Maybe we could launch a small test version of the OHKLA rocket from a balloon?
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Main CLLARE workgroups: Mission Planning, Navigation and Guidance. I do maths, physics, C, Python and Java.
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1:21 am
April 11, 2010
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Luke Maurits
| | Adelaide, Australia | |
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Ellaborating on useful things which could be cheaply tested from high altitude balloons:
- Parachutes, parachute release mechanisms and associated sensors for OHKLA. Basically, we could build a minimalist mock-up of the OHKLA nose cone, containing the recovery system and anything need to support it, lift it up to 30 km or higher in a balloon and then just drop it, to see what happens. This would not only test the recovery hardware, but would give us a chance to practice the recovery process, in a much cheaper and easier way than doing rocket launches.
- Judging by the pictures people have taken from high altitude balloon projects, in which the curvature of Earth's horizon is immediately obvious, high altitude balloon flights could be a good testing ground for horizon scanners (which are useful for attitude determination in LEO). I am interested to see if we could build a functioning "software horizon scanner" of our own, using just a high quality digital camera (possibly with some filters infront of the lense) and good image processing software.
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Main CLLARE workgroups: Mission Planning, Navigation and Guidance. I do maths, physics, C, Python and Java.
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2:14 pm
April 12, 2010
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antinode
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Luke Maurits said:
- Photos of the Earth taken at high balloon altitudes look really awesome, could be great for propaganda.
Marketing is generally the more acceptable term. 
I definitely agree with your points though, and I would love to see this happen. This has been done for $150 by some MIT students with the bulk of the cost going towards the balloon/gas (~$50), a prepaid mobile phone for tracking (~$50), and a digital camera with updated firmware to automatically take photos (~$50). The would be simple enough where the basics could be decided upon online, and one CSTARTer could put it all together and launch it with a couple friends.
It could obviously be made more complicated though, with an embedded computer system with multiple sensors and specialized software, which would make more sense for a lot of the examples you presented. It would also present CSTART as serious engineers, and not just some people who hack together consumer products.
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6:48 pm
April 12, 2010
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Luke Maurits
| | Adelaide, Australia | |
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Marketing, of course! Nice catch. :)
This is definitely something which can be done quickly and cheaply, which is why I am fairly enthusiastic about it. However, it can't be done quickly and cheaply until we have say 5 or so people who live in the same place at the same time to work on it, which currently we don't. I have a friend who has wanted to do one of these projects for ages, and he has interested friends too, but for some reason these giant balloons seem harder to come by in Australia than the US. We've seen some on eBay (seller in the US) that we could get shipped out, though, so that is a potential path.
If some preliminary experiments go well, I can envision something like the modular satellite project idea: where we eventually have a standard base gondola for the balloons which contains the bread-and-butter stuff (GPS tracking and radio broadcast of location, camera), and we just strap stuff we want to test (horizon scanners, OHKLA parachute systems whatever) onto that depending on what we want to test. This sort of system could become quite valuable to us, letting us test things in a near-vacuum, low temperature, high(er) radiation environment several times per day at lower cost than any alternative.
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Main CLLARE workgroups: Mission Planning, Navigation and Guidance. I do maths, physics, C, Python and Java.
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11:29 pm
April 22, 2010
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forever_erratic
| | Minneapolis, MN, USA, Earth, etc. | |
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Post edited 11:45 pm – April 22, 2010 by forever_erratic
So, you know how JP has their 3-stage rockoon system? Would it be possible to launch a high-altitude balloon from low-altitude balloons? In other words, make a "balloonoon?" or something? To see if we can get an even higher launch for an eventual, um, rockoonoon?
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11:55 pm
April 22, 2010
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brmj
| | Rochester, New York, United States | |
| Member | posts 402 | |
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forever_erratic said:
So, you know how JP has their 3-stage rockoon system? Would it be possible to launch a high-altitude balloon from low-altitude balloons? In other words, make a "balloonoon?" or something? To see if we can get an even higher launch for an eventual, um, rockoonoon?
I think JP's airship to orbit concept has a bit in common with that, actually. In case you aren't familiar with it, they essentially want to use an airship to get to a balloon based station in the upper atmosphere where another airship, designed for higher altitudes, can then be assembled and launched. That one would then ascend even higher, then use ion engines to reach orbital velocity at the very edge of space.
The fact that they are looking at using two different airships like that suggests to me that there is, in fact, something substantial to be gained through optimizing a balloon for a given altitude. I don't know just how much of a gain that is, though. This is probably worth looking into, though with expendible baloons the added complexity of such a setup may well be a problem.
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Main work groups: Propulsion (booster), Spacecraft Engineering, Computer Systems, Navigation and Guidance (software)
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4:09 am
July 2, 2010
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Luke Maurits
| | Adelaide, Australia | |
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The idea of a balloon-based project to support OHKLA and a CubeSat project featured fairly heavily in my recent proposal for a more sensibly structured set of projects, which so far has not drawn any serious criticism. I'm thinking of making a post to /r/tothemoon soon to put out word that we are moving toward this, and solicit interested people, their backgrounds and their physical location, so that we can move toward making a start on our first balloon project, which should be quick and cheap.
Before doing this, however, I feel like we should do a little bit of work to really define the goals and requirements of the project, so let's do that here.
I see the primary use for a good balloon platform being to test hardware and systems for other projects – testing radio systems, testing parachutes, testing air-tightness of seals, testing thermal properties of systems in an environment with minimal conduction, etc. – and a secondary use being the raising of revenue with an advertising service, like the one JPA do.
The most sensible thing to me feels like a "universal gondola", or family of universal gondolas, which all attach to balloons in the same way, have some basic functionality built in, like GPS location broadcasting over radio and/or cell phone, and are otherwise just a series of mounting points for attaching other things to. When we want to fly some hardware for testing purposes, we choose the most appropriate gondola for mounting the hardware to (based on the shape/size/mass of the hardware) and go, knowing that all the basics have already been sorted out. For the advertising program, we could have a single hardware unit consisting of a frame to attach the adverts to and an appropriately aligned camera(s) which attaches to one of the gondolas. Do other people feel that this makes sense?
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Main CLLARE workgroups: Mission Planning, Navigation and Guidance. I do maths, physics, C, Python and Java.
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9:14 pm
July 8, 2010
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Luke Maurits
| | Adelaide, Australia | |
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Really, nobody is interested in this? :p
Here's a relatively detailed page about one person's high altitude balloon project. I found this picture quite interesting:
 
In particular I am intrigued by the primary and secondary payload concept. My understanding is that FAA regulations let you have as many payload packages on a balloon as you want as long as (i) no individual payload package has a mass of more than 6 lb (2.7 kg) and (ii) the total mass of all payloads combined does not exceed 12 lbs (5.4 kg).
This suggests a straightforward form for our balloon project: we design, build and test something which takes the position of the secondary payload in the photo above. It handles communications, recovery, power, etc. Arbitrary payloads, as determined by the requirements of customers or CSTART's internal projects, are linked to it in the position of the primary payload in the above photo – cables between the two can convey power and data as required. This allows us to fly arbitary payloads with a single well-tested and known-reliable core payload to take care of the really important stuff. "Users" of the system can design a payload for their particular project experiment and not have to worry at all about the boring standard stuff associated with recovery, they can just focus on their work.
The most obvious thing to fly as a payload attached to such a system would be a camera – keeping this standalone from the main system makes sense: we dont' have to waste mass with a camera when we really don't need one, and we can always attach an extra camera payload package on the bottom of other payloads when we have the mass to spare.
A possible stage-structure:
- Stage 1: GPS coordinate broadcast by amateur radio OR GSM network. Just to practice balloon filling, deployment and recovery.
- Stage 2: Logging from onboard sensors (temperature, puressure, etc.) and GPS coordinate broadcast by radio AND GSM (for redundancy and convenience).
- Stage 3: Digital I/O with main payload: core system can store data from main payload, main payload can read GPS and sensor data from core system. Solar power?
This has some parallels with the ideas for the OHKLA avionics I spoke about recently. Using as much of the same electronics and software for the two purposes seems sensible.
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Main CLLARE workgroups: Mission Planning, Navigation and Guidance. I do maths, physics, C, Python and Java.
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6:50 am
July 9, 2010
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J. Simmons
| | Dayton, OH, USA | |
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Luke, your thoughts on having universal gondolas reminded me about this group (http://www.ansr.org/) in Arizona. They have a standard base configuration and then add experiments as payloads to that system. I also agree that balloons would make great open space projects, and I think you captured all of the key reasons why. We have talked about them in the past at Mach 30. Here is a forum thread from our site that lists several different groups' high altitude balloon projects. The pics they get are amazing. And the costs? Well, I don't think it gets any cheaper to do edge of space research & development.
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Founder Mach 30, Inc. and Friend of CSTART
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9:15 pm
July 9, 2010
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Luke Maurits
| | Adelaide, Australia | |
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| posts 1483 | |
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Thanks for those links, J. There really are a lot of good amateur high altitude balloon groups out there these days (although none I've seen so far who are explicitly open source, or who are flying these balloons as part of anything "larger" like rocketry or CubeSat projects). It should be easy to find a lot of good information on what does and doesn't work, best practices, etc. when/if CSTART starts its own.
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Main CLLARE workgroups: Mission Planning, Navigation and Guidance. I do maths, physics, C, Python and Java.
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10:42 pm
February 26, 2011
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Luke Maurits
| | Adelaide, Australia | |
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| posts 1483 | |
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I've seen various hints around the cstart.org-space that there is in fact very interesting real work happening with regards to CloudLab. Brmj is apparently leading this work but it sounds to me like other people are involved also. The work has progressed to the stage of people actually buying actual hardware, which as far as I know is a CSTART first. There have also been substantial design decisions made, e.g. Arduino seems to have been replaced by BeagleBoard.
I think it's great that all of the above is happening, it's the nearest thing there is to a sign of life in CSTART at the moment.
However, I don't really think it's all that great that this is all happening so silently. I don't mean to imply anybody involved is deliberately keeping things secret, and I know keeping the rest of us up to date is nowhere near as exciting as actually doing work, but people really need to know more about this. At the very least, it would be great if brmj could make a forum post so that the core members know what is up, and then we should start thinking about how best to integrate any news, pictures, etc. into the webpage/Wiki/whatever so that the community can know we are actually finally doing stuff.
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Main CLLARE workgroups: Mission Planning, Navigation and Guidance. I do maths, physics, C, Python and Java.
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6:40 am
March 1, 2011
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rpulkrabek
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Post edited 6:57 am – March 1, 2011 by rpulkrabek
Hopefully brmj can provide more information. He and I have started to take a look at openspacemovement.org. I feel that it is still a bit unorganized and not yet ready, but does show promise. There is a calendar there, though, that is showing that Cloudlab has bi-weekly meetings on irc. Perhaps more could be discussed at these meetings about Cloudlab updating the rest of us.
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