A little company dreams of replacing rocket power with buoyancy.
"Along with several hundred others, it sat nested in a "high rack"—a spindly construction bristling with cameras, antennas, Styrofoam boxes, blue fabric fins, and a parachute. On a frigid Saturday before dawn in April 2013, five high racks, holding a total of nearly 2,000 PongSats, rested in Nevada's Black Rock Desert. Soon, a helium-filled balloon would carry each rack 100,000 feet into the stratosphere.
Through the PongSat (short for Ping-Pong satellite) program, anyone anywhere can create a scientific experiment, as long as it fits inside a Ping-Pong ball, that will be flown to the stratosphere, retrieved, and returned—free of charge—along with flight information, a flight video, and a certificate of participation. Some contain tiny micro-processors, cosmic-ray counters, or telemetry systems. Others come from schoolchildren: boxes of PongSats with lists of their contents—M&Ms, crayons, a daisy. Some include a scientific hypothesis in the form of a question: "Popcorn kernels (Will they pop?)"; "Mini-marshmallow (Will it expand?)."
Some programs charge over $200,000 USD for scientists to conduct experiments in space. PongSat embodies John Powell's belief in access to near-space science for everyone. For over 30 years, Powell and his all-volunteer group, JP Aerospace, have connected ordinary people with space. They accomplish this by shrinking the size of the experiment, sending it up with balloons instead of rockets, and settling for a trip to 100,000 feet—19 miles (space begins at around 62 miles). And by piggybacking the racks onto flights paid for by customers needing to launch commercial or research payloads…"
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Amicalement
Armand
takes a gamble on a blurry image in an auction.
