Blog:
autonomous trans-atlantic balloon project

Almost time for the next flight!

Hi All,
We're almost ready for the next flight, Spirit of Knoxville IV. We are a few days from being fully assembled and ready to go. Once we are ready, we will not necessarily launch right then, we must wait for the Jet Stream to flow just right from Tennessee to Europe or Africa. Sign up using the alert link above to get a 48-hour warning of when the launch will occur.

The February 6 MetroPulse newspaper in Knoxville, TN (http://metropulse.com) has a story on our intrepid efforts to cross the Atlantic. We have finished some long-planned changes to the web site just in time for the new visitors coming on in from the MetroPulse. There is now a Frequently Asked Questions list, a nice list of our active members and email links for each, a navigation index at the bottom of the pages, and finally some credit for people who have really helped us out, named now as sponsors.

Thanks,
Dan

3 flights down, halfway through the season

Hi All,
Our first three SNOX test flights have given us volumes of good information, while they have not crossed the ocean, every one reveals the next problem we need to solve. Flight 1 showed that we needed to do more research on how fast our ballast drops, and when to drop it. Flight 2 showed us that we needed to inflate the balloon rapidly, and keep it at a constant temperature while on the ground. Fligth 3 showed us that strange errors can indeed happen, and the flight computer needs to report every detail back to us that it can when it encounters an unexpected problem.

We have improved all these issues and more, and are predicting SNOX IV will be ready after the last week in January. Photos are up from flight III and video from flight II is up!

Thanks,
Dan

New site design

Hello everyone,

We have just rolled out a redesign of the Spirit of Knoxville website. It may look mostly the same to the eye, but it's a major revision to the code. Thanks to Chad for his assistance.

Be sure to keep an eye on this blog for (mostly) up-to-date information as we prepare for our next launch.

I wanted to take a moment to thank everyone who has written over the last few months. Many of you have offered comments, suggestions, and ideas. I want to apologize to those of you who never received a response; all of us on the team have full-time jobs and are getting ready for the upcoming holiday season. We are squeezing in ballooning as best we can, and (at least for my part) doing often takes precedence over writing. All the same, be assured we read and consider every piece of correspondence that comes in, and try to answer if you have posed a specific question.

I also want to thank everyone who has participated in the DTRC network. It has been a phenomenal success -- through you, we had copy on the last balloon right down to the ocean surface, despite the fact that we couldn't hear a peep directly here in Knoxville.

We have some exciting changes brewing for the website. Stay tuned, and thanks for your interest!

73,
Mike

Ballast bits and analyses

We had a fun meeting tonight, we all got a little silly with our ideas for ballast drop improvements - bananas, sheet metal, sugar, sand, water balloons, leaflets with instructions for how to become a US citizen, BBs, you name it, we thought about it and thought about what would happen to the object and anything it landed on.   We decided to stay away from the denser objects to avoid the ire of passing ships who wouldn't appreciate holes in their deck plates, and also considered that we might like to travel on if we do get to dry land again without rudely dropping weights onto populated areas.  we settled on a neat idea of dropping stacks of paper.  Biodegradable and safe for the environment and safe for impact, the heavy stack of paper will dissipate into thousands of microgram sheets of paper within a few thousand feet of being released.  Ballast dumping times will be adjusted a bit for these additional weights.

Talked with Mark Caviezel about the balloon performance tonight, he was pleased and said the climb was a record fast ascent, quite faster than we wanted, but it demonstrated that we did not lose a lot of altitude after the initial overshoot and settle to float.

We tested an attempted improvement on the ballast bottle solenoid with no effect.  We will just do more ground testing to collect data on the performance of the pressurized system.

The new web site is getting quite exciting, all kinds of linked up stuff going into it, this blog perhaps  being one of them.  Taking a personal day off or two this weekend though, need a bit of a breather.  Even doing what you love nearly every free minute of the day outside of the normal 40 hour workweek wears your body down a bit.
-Dan

Hello all

This will be sort of a journal for us on our trans-atlantic quest.

Our web presence has been improving markedly in the last week or two, thanks to Chad, Eric and Mike. It's looking pretty neat, and should avoid issues if we get a lot of traffic.

We're now analyzing the data that was collected (yay for the people who ran our decoding software DTRC!) and will be trying to figure out why the balloon fell so soon, and other things to improve for the next flight.

-Dan