PIPER Mission Visit Day 1

Before I get too far gone describing Julie and Jimmy’s excellent adventure I would like to thank NASA NC Space Grant and Durham Technical Community College for supporting us and footing the substantial bill for our transit to New Mexico. I hope that we can make what we have learned be of service to these two agencies.

I’m going to split this into multiple posts so as not to overwhelm my reader(s) with all of the cool stuff that we did in New Mexico.

We got into Lubbock, TX very late on Sunday night and went to the grocery store for supplies because many food options are closed on Mondays in Fort Sumner. We’d been traveling for most of the day, and still had a 2.5 hr drive through vast emptiness in front of us, so we didn’t make the best food choices at the store. Por ejemplo: we bought a watermelon and a pumpkin…it seemed like a good idea at the time. 

I’ve joked that Super 8 was sick of me before I even arrived and perhaps they were, because they put me in the worst room in the whole place, right across from Schrödinger’s lobby which housed a door that managed to be paradoxically a door and a dying fire alarm. (Also, free straws!)

Monday morning was the roll out, a time to test and weigh PIPER, and what was likely to be the main event for our trip. Cell service, email and texting were not reliable in Fort Sumner so we’d been given the marching orders to show up around 6AM for the show, but we kept checking the various cameras at the base and not seeing any activity. Jimmy offered to run to the base (5 minutes away) while I finished “breakfast” and to swing back by the hotel to scoop me up if the action was starting.

When he came right back to get me he kept talking about the hundreds of bunnies that he saw on his way out…and I didn’t realize he wasn’t kidding. I love NASA. I love bunnies. NASA + HUNDREDS OF BUNNIES= IS IT MY BIRTHDAY ALREADY?!

I should never have doubted him. That place was swarming with rabbits. Big 'uns. Small 'uns. And one unfortunate, smashed one.

CSBF is plopped in the middle of a flat and desolate area. It is essentially a small air field with a few hangars dotting the tarmac. In the distance you can see some mesas, few trees and a line of patient windmills.

Paul met up with us right away and gave us a quick tour before the roll out began in earnest. I had not seen PIPER since the summer and I was impressed by all of the extra electronics and layers that had been tacked onto the outside.

One of the things that impressed me the most was the scale of everything. Our payload is the size of a small Styrofoam cooler…because it is a small Styrofoam cooler. You can see how large PIPER is and it feels even more substantial in person. Our rigging is made out of light Dacron kite string. Theirs is, in places, made out of braided steel. Our chute is the size of a hand towel. Theirs is the size of a warehouse. Our balloon is, impressively, about six to eight feet tall. Their balloon is the size of two football fields.

During the roll out we were treated to a spectacular sunrise followed by a full rainbow with some bonus rainbows! Rainbows indicate…rain…and some sprinkles forced the payload into the shelter of the hangar for a bit. Before that PIPER was rigged, ballast was tested and the entire unit was weighed using a massive truck.

Around this time my best friend found me on the online cameras and that added a whole other layer of surrealness to an already dreamlike event.

Before I started HAB this time last year I had no idea that high altitude ballooning was a thing. Before Jimmy started his internship I didn’t know that NASA was using high altitude ballooning for science. Before we visited CSBF I did not realize that high altitude ballooning was serious business. Scientists and engineers from all over the country are working on these experiments and launching them from a sprinkling of bases, like CSBF, that are scattered worldwide. Walking through these workshops and seeing dedicated, high tech, HAB specific technology was eye opening for me.

You might recall my confusion at being invited on this trip at all. Now that it’s in the books I suspect that Paul invited me for two reasons:

1.       I ask a lot of questions.

2.       Entertainment value.

Every time I would (temporarily) run out of questions Paul would prod me with, “What else?” and I was always surprised to have yet another question.

(I made Jimmy pose like this for his senior pictures.)

After the roll out was complete, we took a break to eat our weird lunch and then came back to base for the weather briefing. It’s hard to pick a favorite part of the trip, so I won’t, but the weather briefing was brilliant. First of all, it was held in the hangar that I had been watching online for a week and a half. I had a ridiculous rush of fan-girl thrill as we crossed across the floor.  The meeting took place in an average conference room where everyone gathered to hear the odds of the next possible “show day” and we went over the forecasted wind and pressure systems for the next few days. We were cautiously optimistic that Wednesday morning would be a good time for a launch, with Saturday as a possible backup. The entire meeting took less than fifteen minutes. If you know me in real life you know how much this thrilled me.

After the weather briefing, Paul put Jimmy to work making a sunshield. I got the fantastically satisfying job of peeling the plastic coating off of some sheet steel. Peeling plastic + NASA + bunnies…dang…I could die now and my life would be complete.

BUT WAIT. THERE’S MORE.

After that was done, Paul said, “Hey we have part of the rigging that is orange and we need it to be shiny. Fix it.” I got set up with a huge roll of mylar, mylar tape, scissors and some giant space bungees. My first attack of metalizing the space tubes went poorly. I was being chintzy with material. I’m used to my low budget/ weight miser space program. After a quick check in with Paul I started again and did it the “Julie Way.” (Precision but not accuracy.) I cut large swaths of mylar, taped the seams, reinforced the mylar with tape bands and made tape on tape connections whenever I could. I ended up with a flexible design that made me either want a baked potato or a burrito for dinner. (I had neither. I don’t recall what I did eat only that it was in the middle of the night.)

Jimmy was earnestly working on his sunshield and I had to stop my MUCH MORE IMPORTANT WORK to begrudgingly assist him in the machine shop. (Just kidding. I loved it.) The machine shop housed wonderful 1960’s work horse tools, a mishmash of materials organized in apparent disarray, and charming balloon specific notes and doodads. I really wished that my dad could see it.

Jimmy and I had a crash course in bending metal and then realized that we were getting slap happy and decided to call it a day. As we left the hangar we had to stop and pull the car over to gawk at the moon.

Giving new meaning to "Space Crafts."

Scrub

No launch this morning.

Quick Update

Internet access is sketchy at best so I am making fewer updates than I promised but I will give you a full report when I return.

I take back at least 30% of the bad things I ever sad about New Mexico. The weather and scenery here are phenomenal and we've taken a ton of photos. From the road hares, to the moonrise, to the delicate clouds and a full rainbow on test day...it's been a photographers dream.

We are doing absolutely zero in the way of tourism which is fine by me.

Everything has been really fascinating. I think the biggest shock for me is how vast and technical the science balloon field is! It's been incredible to see the things that we do as a hobbyist inflated (ha) to this magnitude. The similarities and differences are really interesting to me and it's been a unique experience to shadow all of these scientists and engineers as they do their work.

Check hangar cam for us 10 til and 10 after  4pm (EST) as we go through to the weather briefing. If that goes well then we might be cleared for the big show of a real launch with fill starting at 8am (EST) on Wednesday.

Random Photo Dump

Morning

Second stage cleared!!

At the airport!

I've been glued to my screen the last few days trying to catch the experiments that are launching before PIPER.

We had a little riffle of concern this morning when we heard that the BETTII flight had been postponed to next year because of the weather. I spent the morning in limbo, wondering if I should pack or research cancelling our plans. It was a RAVS. 

An email from Paul Mirel assured us that PIPER was still ready to fly and this was actually fortuitous for us because it meant that no one was in the queue ahead of PIPER so our odds of actually seeing PIPER launch were even better!

To celebrate, I've been watching LDB climb heavenward as I pack and obnoxiously emailing prntscrns of the progress to my friends and family.

ETA: We've changed our plans AGAIN! Now we're not leaving until Sunday. Stay tuned/alert.

G'Boro Maker Faire

First of all, the Greensboro MakerFaire was a great event and I wish that I'd made more time to browse. Secondly, we didn't go to Fort Bragg but Fayetteville weather came to us. It was hot and way too sunny for this redhead.

Not too hot for the fire eaters, though.

NC A&T had two cool projects out but I didn't have time to chat because we were focused on balloons. I had the new tUR Cannon and SPOT so I was trying to test them. (This is part of the reason why I dropped the ball on live blogging.)

Paul L., who helped us with our hydrogen launch, was leading these event and did a good job of bringing in a crowd.

The launch, NC NearSpace's 50th, was smooth and quick. The crowd was impressed with the whole thing and a few people spoke with me about the goals of the operation. 

After we lost sight of it, Paul went to man the base and Chris, Jimmy and I were off on chase. Unlike our other launches, this balloon wasn't going very far so we had time to eat a leisurely lunch and wait for the balloon to land.

What didn't go well was our recovery! We had a good idea of where it landed, and it did land very close to the launch site, but we climbed out of the car without gearing up and that was a mistake on such a hot day. Chris found the payload almost immediately but then we all lost each other. After two hours of stumbling around a dry creek bed we met up with Chris and he took us a short walk away to the massive tulip poplar that had snagged the payload. The release mechanism they had engineered failed and the payload stayed out of reach. Chris marked the tree and then we drove back home empty handed.

Jimmy and I agreed that we learned a lot from this launch and made some quick notes in the car on the way home. 

Our Spot isn't tracking us yet. (User error?) The Canon took some nice photos (above) but currently takes them v-e-r-y-s-l-o-w-l-y. We're going to need to address that.

NC NearSpace has a plan B for recovery so hopefully we'll get some photos of the mission.

It's steamy.

I'm on the wrong side of a barbed wire fence.

Close!

Say cheese, Jimmy

Launch went well. Lunch in progress.

RAVS and a Fundraising Idea

We will be in town for the Greensboro MakerFaire and the weather looks warm and dry. It should be a pleasant day for a chase and projections show the balloon going away from the coast! I'm going to brave Gaspocalypse 2016 and fuel up the Adventuremobile tomorrow.

As of the time of this writing, we have re-scheduled our flight, rental car and hotel for the PIPER mission a total of three times and anticipate having to do it at least one more time. It's stressful because we can lose money rather spectacularly if we tick the wrong box, but on each iteration we learn more! I feel like our most recent round of bookings is our best yet. If you need to book a room at the one hotel in Fort Sumner, NM let me know, and I'll tell you all of my tricks. (But you should call because they are totally sick of my shenanigans.)



My best friend keeps referring to this trip as a vacation and recently encouraged me to view our itinerary changes as an exercise in radical acceptance. Now I'm calling it my Radical Acceptance Vacation Situation. I've been prepping by making packing lists and lurking on the Fort Sumner Hanger Cam. (It reminds me of late nights in graduate school watching NASA TV. Do you know about NASA TV? My favorite is when they show a mostly vacant control room with people shuffling around and drinking coffee.)

My past students are concerned that I'll add another entry to the ways I've almost died.
Current students are concerned that I'll never leave and I won't cancel class or that I'll end up in actual, what some might refer to as, "Old" Mexico.

I'm concerned that this is the trip where Jimmy and I finally devolve into some sort of ginger-speak-
crypto-language. Either that or we'll implode in full Machiavellian glory in an airport Sbarro and Ryan will finally get to lead The Unacceptable Risks and turn it into a Folk Punk band.

Feel free to place bets on any one of these eventualities as part of our new fundraising scheme. Contact our bookie, David.

I like how these pictures show me looking carefree and full of sunshine while Jimmy looks like a big ball of stress when the reality of launch day is the opposite 99% of the time. The constant blogging by phone is entirely accurate. I'm looking forward to these two upcoming launches because they are neither my circus nor my monkeys. 

As the Bloon tURns

When we last left our intrepid heroes they had completed another successful mission in an epic season finale full of excitement! 

Even though the blog has been quiet the team has been active. Everyone had a busy summer. 

Jimmy went to Goddard for his internship. Hopefully he'll tell you about that in his own post.

The rest of the team met a few times over the summer to test out the new drone and prepare for our new UAS project that we are going to do with NCCU. We met so many times because the new drone was being persnickety. If you're wondering when we met, just think back to all of the days where the weather said, "Feels like 110 degrees." It was so molten one day that the factory plastic was melting on the drone. On the day we finally got the thing to fly it was so hot that we just made it hover for a minute, landed it, and ran inside.

And of course, one day it was just me and Ryan and we talked about anarchist literature and giggled for a full hour. This is why we won't let Ryan complete the bloodless coup to overthrow Jimmy that he wants so badly. 

We also took the time to hike and keep up our balloon retrieval bushwhacking skills. 

I purchased a new balloon chase vehicle that can haul all of the TURDS that we lovingly dubbed, "The Adventuremobile." We've been testing it on all sorts of adventures already! Now it has a fabulous HAB sticker on it too. I should take a photo of that because it's adorable and says, "SEEN" and "HEARD" on it.

So what's new for Season 2 of,  "As the Bloon tURns?"

BIG THINGS.

HUGE.

IN SOME CASES THE SIZE OF TWO FOOTBALL FIELDS!

We began the season, like all good television, with a surprising plot twist.

As you've seen above, Jimmy had an internship at Goddard over the summer and near the end of his term he gave a poster presentation as a part of a massive intern poster session, and I was lucky enough to be invited to attend. The event was jam packed and full of fascinating student work spread all over an entire building. They were crammed in like extremely intelligent sardines. I was buoyed to see so many remote sensing projects!

While I was there I sneaked into the lab that Jimmy was working with and had the chance to meet with Paul Mirel, his summer mentor.  Below you can see the payload of the PIPER project. This will be carried by a balloon the size of two football fields. It was humbling and inspiring to think about the scale and mass of this project compared to ours. 

NASA NC Space Grant pledged to fund Jimmy to go to New Mexico at the end of this summer to see the pay off of all of his soldering and riveting as this thing gets launched into the sky. I offered to drive him to the airport. Imagine my surprise when Paul sent Jimmy an email that said, "Bring Julie." 

Julie? Me?

Or as my role model Miss. Piggy would say, "Moi?"

What?

I CAN even and I will. I don't know if he meant me but -SURPRISE- I'm coming. I bought steel toed boots. You don't have to ask me twice.*

After a few emails with Jimmy to double-check he meant me (I'm still not entirely sold) we booked our passage to New Mexico. We're essentially on call from now until mid-October because huge balloon launches are even more weather dependent than teeny ones. Here's hoping this one doesn't land in Fayetteville, NC. 

BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE! 

This summer I spent two solid weeks writing an application for the NASA Swarmathon, a competition put on by the University of New Mexico that we had the honor to participate in last year. I was hopeful that since the team had medaled in the Virtual competition that we would have a shot at the Physical competition. This is the one where we would get to play with the small rover bots. If we were accepted they would send us actual robots to build and program and we might even get to compete at Kennedy Space Center. This competition is open to schools across the US, and not just community colleges. Most schools host the work in a class. Most schools have a faculty lead who knows a lot about programming and robots. I knew it would be a long shot but I owed it to the team to apply.

Well, hold onto thine hats people and hold onto the hat of the person next to you and if you don't have on a hat go find one because you're going to need it.

We were accepted!

Kory Menke, back from his fellowships over the summer, has generously agreed to mentor us even though he is now at NCSU. 

We've already had one organizational meeting and a ton of bright students came out. I am continually amazed at how talented our students are. I had them fill out information sheets where they listed their skills and I can assure you that this is going to be an exciting year for the Durham Tech Swarm.

Above is a small portion of the new team unboxing the Swarmies and here's me looking derpy and bleeding all over some official NASA Swarmathon screws.

We've also spent the last month writing a drone grant proposal with NCCU. We might not get it because it's a very competitive grant but we've decided that either way, we're going to do something scientific with drones and NCCU this year because we both bought drones and we're tired of making them fight.

"Wow. That's a lot of excitement. I need a nap."

Too bad. I'm not done.

This weekend, 09/24, if we are still in town, Space Viking and I will be assisting NC Near Space with a balloon launch and chase at the Greensboro Maker Faire. (Does that extra "e" on "fair" mean that I have to wear a corset? I really hope not.) We'll be launching around noon from the Forge at 219 W Lewis St, Greensboro, NC 27406. Come on out! I will probably blog about this. We're looking forward to the opportunity to see how NC Near Space runs a launch, check out their telemetry, and hopefully have a fun chase. 

AND

I hope that Greensboro likes having we gingers around because we've also been asked to speak at the Greensboro Science Cafe on October 20th. If you're perusing this entry, and you've made it down this far, you're probably a pretty faithful reader of this blog, so you know all about our past adventures, but you should come out anyway! It'll be fun! Jimmy can sign your baby!

So, Julie, this is all very glamorous but what about bloonz? 

Bloonz heard.

I am thrilled to announce that the gang is all back together and we're working on a new launch for the fall! The challenge is that we need to amass a whole new set of TURDs from scratch! We're having weekly calls and researching equipment. While it is nice to have the freedom to fly whatever we want it's also quite daunting because we want to make sure that we are investing in the right stuff, launching reliable materials, engineering the best payload that we can and doing all of it for basically $0. We're going to have a yard sale to boost some funds but I'm also very resourceful so I am looking forward to the challenge of a patchwork, mini, space program.

So, stay tuned!

*Actually. You often have to ask me multiple times because I'm very polite and will demur.

Happy One Month Launch-a-versary!

Hello Darlings, I made you a video. 

A few people on the team said they hadn't seen many photos from the last launch so I quickly compiled them together into this wee retrospective. 

Now that my bug bites and scratches have faded I'm ready to do it again. The team has been meeting over the summer to unbox new equipment, hike and just enjoy hanging out together. We're hoping to pull off at least one launch in the fall.