NASA releases final report on balloon launch mishap - 10/22/2010

A few weeks later than planned, the Mishap Investigation Board published today a two volume set containing their conclusions after the investigation done on the aborted launch of the NCT (Nuclear Compton Telescope).

As you may remember from our past updates, the launch incident occured in the Alice Springs airport, in central Australia in the morning of April 29, 2010 when during the manouver to allow the balloon take the payload, the gondola detached from the launch crane and fell off. After that, the payload was dragged several meters over the ground and hit on this way a car parked in the other side of a fence. As a result of the mishap, not only the rest of the launch campaign in Australia was cancelled but a flight restriction was impossed over all NASA balloon activities, including domestic flights from Fort Sumner (NM), Palestine (TX) and a collaboration with the Swedish Space Corporation to launch an instrument called POGOLITE from Kiruna.

The 127 pages report is entitled "Nuclear Compton Telescope Balloon Launch in Alice Springs, Northern Territory, Australia. High Visibility Type B Mishap" and as far as we know, this is the first time such an internal balloon investigation report is made public by NASA.

In the summary of findings, the MIB put a high attention in the public safety issue as a logical consequence of the widespread coverage that the mishap has. The report identify as a primary undesired outcome the fact that the "...NCT payload caused damage to private vehicles and nearly caused death or injury to the general public..." and two other secondaries outcomes in the costs associated with the reparations due to the mishap and the risk suffered by contractor personnel at the moment of the gondola release.

Also, during the investigation were identified other three proximate causes, several significant intermediate causes and contributing factors. From these, the MIB made several recommendations to the Balloon Program Office. Among other points these suggestions are:

• to perform a complete hazard analysis considering all phases of the balloon launch process
• to tighten measures on regard spectators or passers-by entering hazardous areas during launches
• to assign a range safety officer properly trained
• to revise the balloon ground safety plan to cover all phases, from inflation through recovery
• to develop a hazardous operating procedure to cover the launch process, establishing launch criteria and flight rules
• to ensure that training for the launch crew covers the widest possible set of anomalous occurrences in the launch process
• to clearly and unambiguously define the Category A hazard area with visible markings
• to evaluate balloon launch hardware mechanisms through testing and review of documentation and specifications to determine proper operating conditions and ranges
• to specifically address how to deal with the general public in the ground safety plan
• to implement an effective safety program across the facility and for all contracts
• to review balloon safety documentation for clarity and accuracy

This list is merely a glimpse of all recommendations along the report. We will take our time to read it entirelly and publish our humble opinions -if any-. But besides this, after reading the Executive Summary alone the big question here is to know how would they affect the continuation of a "natural born risky" business as scientific ballooning, inside this new "safety" paradigm the Balloon Program Office will be turning to.

Let's see.

Red Bull Stratos in hold by a lawsuit - 10/12/2010

The small publication appeared today, in the same place when month after month the Red Bull Stratos team unveiled a little bit of their project to send a man to the stratosphere to beat the high altitude parachute record jump set by Joe Kittinger back in the 60's.

"...Red Bull GmbH and Red Bull North America, Inc. have decided to stop the Red Bull Stratos program with immediate effect.

Felix Baumgartner had been scheduled to undertake a stratospheric balloon flight to 120,000 feet and attempt a freefall jump that would, for the first time, reach supersonic speeds as well as deliver valuable scientific data.

Despite the fact that many other people over the past 50 years have tried to break Colonel (Ret.) Joe Kittinger's record, and that other individuals have sought to work with Red Bull in an attempt to break his record, Mr. Hogan claims to own certain rights to the project and filed a multi million dollar lawsuit earlier this year in a Californian court. Red Bull has acted appropriately in its prior dealings with Mr. Hogan, and will demonstrate this as the case progresses. Due to the lawsuit, we have decided to stop the project until this case has been resolved..."

Who is that Mr. Hogan mentioned in the press statement...?. He is a Kansas native who grew up in Texas and is now living in Tanzania, who claims that he approached the company with an identical idea several years prior. In the lawsuit papers filed in California Superior Court, Daniel Hogan alleges that in 2004, he pitched the idea of a similar high-altitude parachuting stunt to Red Bull. "...This was my idea, from start to finish..." Hogan told to the Wall Street Journal in a recent interview.

"...They told me they would put everything they had behind the project...", but, according to a sworn statement Mr. Hogan filed in the case, he received in October 2005 an email from a Red Bull official stating that, "..We would not like to continue our joint work..." on the project. According to Hogan's declarations Kittinger was also pointed as consultor even before the involvement of the veteran parachutist and aeronautic legend with the Red Bull Stratos effort.

According to the court documents, the marketing aproach for the project, the capsule specifications, the pressure suit and even the type of camera systems to be used during the flight were all provided in detail to the Red Bull company by Hogan.

Taking account of the time of the year, probably the next try of the team will be not before Summer 2011. This will give a little light of hope to the French parachutist Michel Fournier (running after the same goal to beat Kittinger's record) to try again in next May.

Let's see how evolves the issue. Stay tuned!

Mixed results for BEXUS this year - 10/10/2010

Kiruna, Sweden.- As occur each October since 2002 a bunch of students from half Europe flooded the balloon launch base of the Swedish Space Corporation, as part of the BEXUS (Balloon EXperiments for University Students) effort. The initiative in the beginning was only a mean to offer a opportunity to launch small instruments in a technical flight performed at ESRANGE every year before the start of an intensive launch campaign. Nowadays and nine succesful missions later, the project evolved enough to assume a fixed place inside the Swedish Space Corporation flight schedule and in the planning efforts of their partners at Deutsches Zentrum für Luft und Raumfahrt (DLR) and the very European Space Agency (ESA). The program first missions involved only students from Kiruna's different space related educative institutions, but now the two annual flights offer opportunities for several colleges and universities of countries like Czchek Republic, Germany, Italy or Belgium to name a few.

BEXUS is a platform that allow students from different years and courses to be involved in a near space project, which means that different groups of students meet and get a chance to work together on the basis of their respective areas of competence. And are the students themselves who lead, design and build the experiments and the instruments destined for the balloon launch, following basic guidelines and fighting several constrains as weight, power consumption, and RF interference among instruments, to name a few. As an aftermath of the experience, the students made post-flight reports to expose the data collected during the balloon flight and later used in their courses.

This year, only one balloon (BEXUS 10) was launched, as the second mission (BEXUS 11) was cancelled due to strong winds on balloon pad, until the launch window closed.

Onboard BEXUS 10 were mounted three experiments.

CASS-E (Cranfield Astrobiological Stratospheric Sampling Experiment) developed by a team of the Cranfield University (UK), devoted to collect a statistically significant number of microbes in the stratosphere. Also is a search for a lower bound volume to sample to provide the first estimate of number of microbes per unit volume of air.

I-BATE (ISU-Balloon ATC Technology Experiment) developed by the International Space University in Strasbourg, France as a proof of concept for space-based air traffic control with ADS-B receiver. At an estimated balloon altitude of 30 kilometers, the receiver will have a line-of-sight range of nearly 1000 kilometers to any aircraft flying at a 10-kilometer altitude and will receive the transmissions of all equipped aircraft within its range.

SCRAT (Spherical Compact Rechargeable Air Thruster) developed by the University of Padova, Italy as part of the project to design and develop a low thrust cold-gas actuator and test it in different ambient conditions, i.e. at different altitudes. Also the experiment is meant to obtain temperature, pressure and density profiles of the ambient air during flight.

After a week or so of integration work at ESRANGE, the first mission was ready to flight on October 5th, but due to the strong winds on surface and the forecast for the next days it was rescheduled to October 8th when the countdown started at midnight and launch was set for 5.00 am, and yet after a long hold at T-1hour 30 minutes, the countdown had to be cancelled due to gusty winds. Another delay set the launch time for the next day and after again another near cancellation finally the winds settled, and the balloon was released at 1:07 utc on October 9th. After a flight of near 5 hours the cutdown command was transmited at 5:29 utc and the gondola landed north of the town of Rovaniemi, in Finland.

On regard the BEXUS 11 mission, was not informed yet the new launch date.

Farewell to a great scientist: Audouin Dollfus - 10/4/2010

Meoudon, France.- Audouin Dollfus, one of the most important European planetary astronomers of the 20th century died Friday October 1 at the age of 85. He was born in Paris in 1924, and was son of Charles Dollfus a French aeronautical pioneer.

In 1946, Dollfus started to work as an astronomer at the Meudon Observatory, obtaining soon the charge of director of the Laboratory of Solar System Physics, while studying at the University of Paris where he obtained in 1955 a doctorate in physical sciences. As a specialist in Solar System objects he often worked at the Pic du Midi Observatory in the French Pyrenees, using his favourite technique of analyzing the polarized light emited by several celestial bodies to obtain information of their properties. Thus, he was able to conclude that the Martian surface could be composed of iron oxide several years before the first probe touched the red planet surface. Also obtained valuable information of the Mercury and Venus atmosphere as well confirmed the absence of such a feature in the Moon.

Dollfus was a very active men and allways seeked to mixture her two passions: aeronautics and astronomy. Thus, in middle 50's he started a project to send a telescope to the stratosphere. The first of the flights took place in 1954 using an open basket gas balloon to achieve -with his father- an altitude of 7 km. In that opportunity they observed Mars with a spectrometer coupled to a telescope to isolate the water vapour band of 0.83 mm. After that his efforts were directed toward the construction of a sealed capsule which would allow to reach a greater height, to use a bigger telescope and also transport Dollfus itself inside it.Due to the fact that the polyethilene balloons used at the time by the americans scientists in the other side of the Atlantic were not reliable enough, Dollfus choose to use common meteorological balloons "Delacoste" and other made in England called "Beritex". A first unmanned test flight was performed at Meudon with a cluster of 12 balloons in June 1956. The final and more memorable flight took place in April 1959, from the Villacoublay Air Force Base, attaining with a cluster of 103 balloons (image) a maximum altitude of 14 km. The flight endured 5 hours during which were performed observations of the atmospheric composition of Venus.

After that, Dollfus remained very active in the astronomy field. By using the refracting telescope of the Pic du Midi Observatory, he was able that same year of 1959 to clearly resolve surface features as small as 300 km in Mercury. But no doubt, one of his biggest discoveries occured in 1966 when he observed for the first time a small inner moon of Saturn which later was baptized Janus. He made this discovery by observing at a time when the rings, very close to the small satellite, were nearly edge-on to the Earth and thus practically invisible.

The exceptional quality of his work, was very appreciated in France and the entire world. He received in 1973 the Galabert trophy of astronautics, in 1993 the Jules Jansen the highest distinction offered by the Astronomical Society of France, aside the Grand Prix de l'Académie des sciences in 1988.

In the last years he was deeply involved with the history of the aerostation in France, as president of the "l'Association pour le Centre Européen des Ballons et des Dirigeables" and was a key person for the creation of the Musée de l'Air et de l'Espace at Meudon's historical "Hangar Y" where nowadays is exhibited among other vehicles the stratospheric capsule of the 1959 flight.

Successful launch for the HELEN 2 rocket at Black Sea - 10/3/2010

Black Sea, Romania.- An image tells more than a thousand of words is a well known saying in my country, and is one that after seeing the images published by ARCA on their web site, probably you will agree to.

At last, after several frustrated efforts, on October 1st was carried out the Mission 4b to launch the HELEN 2 rocket under a stratospheric balloon. As you may remember from our latest updates ARCA is a civilian team from Rumania which entered in the Google Lunar X PRIZE a $30 million international competition to safely land a robot on the surface of the Moon, make it travel 500 meters over the lunar surface, and send images and data back to the Earth.

The balloon launches that they were until now unsuccesfully trying to perform are part of the effort of the team to reach our natural satellite: the gas bag serves as a virtual "first stage" of lift to send the future rocket carrying the lunar probe to the stratosphere and from there launch it. In this way, the craft saves a lot of fuel and effort to beat the gravity in the more denses layers of the low atmosphere.

The operation started early in the morning when the NSSL 281 Constanta military ship, accompanied by other two vessels (Fulgerul and Bombard) left the Constanta harbour and proceeded to a prefixed safety zone offshore the Romanian coast of the Black Sea. Once in the area, at 15:30 the rocket was fueled and lowered onto the sea where floated a few meters away, while in the rear deck of the ship the Romanian Navy team and members of ARCA extended a canvas to start to lay out the balloon. At 16:00 commenced the helium inflation and 40 minutes later the balloon was released picking up the Helen 2 rocket from the waters and trailing it behind.

At 17:20 the balloon reached an altitude of 14 km and once ARCA contacted the Romanian civil aviation authority to request authorization to launch, a command was sent to the rocket that ignited the engine during 30 seconds, putting the rocket to an altitude of 40km. The only flaw of the entire mission occured during reentry as the capsule parachute did not open.

The fast Fulgerul ship, followed by NSSL 281 Constanta proceeded to the estimated impact zone to recover the capsule but after searching during 5 hours neither ship was able to find it. ARCA team is now analyzing the data transmitted by radio telemetry and satellite during the flight.

Truly, this success is a more than deserved reward for the constancy and the effort of the team. Congratulations !.