1000 Student Projects to the Edge of SpaceAbout this project

1000 students will build experiments, art and projects that will be carried above the world by balloon.

Student Experiment at the edge of space. Sat-Balls!

All the projects fit inside ping pong balls. Students from all over the world send us their ball we fly them to stratospheric orbital on balloon. After the landing the balls can be returned to their creators along with data from the flight a DVD with video of the launch and on board scenes and a certificate showing they flew.

I'm always completely floored by the project folks put in their Sat-Balls. Projects have ranged from plant seeds to full upper atmospheric labs all in a ping pong ball.

Computer in a Sat-Ball Sat-Ball Scientists

Sat-Balls are flown at no cost to the participant. Over a thousand students and other Sat-Ball builders can signed for this project.

We will launch the Sat-Balls from your site (after to have received the autorization from Civil Aviation). The vehicle that carry them is called Capsula. The capsula will beassembled on your site. The capsula is made of foam and carbon fiber. I have separate telemetries links to the base tracking it during the flight. At the end of the flight we release the balloon and the capsula descends by parachute.

It lands anywhere from 20 to 250 km away from the launch site. After landing the recover teams with 4wd's head out across the country to bring the high racks back, to download all data, video and pictures of the orbital launch.

A capsula carrying student projects Sat-Balls up top (This is a real picture in flight) It is a real picture (no photoshop here)

Second project, we will carry student experiments to the depths of the sea and back again. We will do it by the thousands and completely free to students, teachers, explorers and anyone who wonders about the ocean depths. The vehicle is like an inverted balloon carrying the Sea-Balls down below 5,000 feet and back again.

Risks and challenges: the most risky part of the journey to the edge of space is the trip to your site.

After a mission we will have nearly 1000 individual items to ship back. It can take us up to three weeks to get it all organized.

After flying over 4,000 Sat-Balls we have only lost 3. However, the risk for a complete vehicle loss does exist. We have flow many flights so far and have gotten pretty good at it. However flight to the edge of space is full of risk. If we lose your Sat-Ball you can send up another and we will fly it again on the very next mission.

Will these interfere with airplanes and pilots?

There are several thousand of these balloons flown everyday by military and civil. Most people don't realize that we still get most of our weather information from balloons. They are launched by the national weather service. This has been done everyday for the past 70 years and there has never been and encounter with an airplane. It's a big sky out there. On top of that we fully coordinate my balloon flights with the local air traffic control.

BOTTLE-CAPS alternative to BALLS