Today was our last dress rehearsal before the launch and we had one snafu after the other. We learned A LOT about filling the balloon and got an accurate weight of the final payload....well....once we did the calculations and looked at the fill rate we realized that something was up. We reached out to High Altitude Science and they told us that we were trying to pull too much with our 600g balloon and thus, we had overfilled it. Ah!!! David, Dan, Jimmy and I had a math filled Google Hangout where we decided what we could afford to lose. We did the math...it checks out. If we replace the batteries with space cookies we can meet our ascent time goals and get the lift we need from a 600g balloon. We can keep the Polimaster! We're glad that we caught this problem in time and thankful that we've been doing so much testing. David and Jimmy worked out duty cycle calculations to make sure we'd have enough power in our power bank. Dan is going to have to make some adjustments to his hull configuration to account for the new load.
Even though we might reach a lower altitude we all agreed that it was more important to be sure that we could recover the payload in once piece with everything still writing!
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