On June 3, Hackerbot Labs recovered AHAB3 and its precious SD cargo bearing pictures from the blue beyond. Spacepunk Alex Peake met the Hackerbot crew shortly after through Willow Bl00 at Maker Faire while exhibiting Tactical Corsets for the first time. They enticed him to come to Toorcamp. While checking them out to make sure they weren't going to steal his kidneys, he came across the AHAB3 pictures in 3ric's flickr. Excited to see they were fellow spacepunks, he flew to Seattle and joined them at the Titan missile silo for the first North-American hacker camp where Spacepunk was publically launched. The photos AHAB3 took became the first background picture for Spacepunk.org.
Read their exciting initial announcement:
Two weeks ago we sent our buddy AHAB3 up into the air. About two hours into the flight and 56062 feet up, we stopped getting position updates. We could hear it transmitting, but it just kept repeating the same position.
Our recovery teams drove around and tried to use the secondary beacon to figure out where it was. We got some good headings using the direction-finding equipment, but then lost all signal from the payload.
We headed back to Seattle, sure we had lost a third payload.
Last Tuesday, 3ric got a call on his cell phone. A forest ranger in Idaho had stumbled across our bumblebee! He hiked it out, and a few days later shipped it off to us.
Monday morning we got a nice present at the lab, gingerly removed the SD card, and were greeted with:
Tonight the we’re going to go over the payload with a fine-toothed comb, and catalogue what’s broken and what’s still working. A number of systems malfunctioned during the flight, so it’s vital to know why if we want to do this again.
More photos can be found here
JP Aerospace is a volunteer organization practicing a concept I've only ever fantasized about with my friends: airships are launch platforms. And these discussions never really go beyond "well, lets put a rocket on a balloon and see what happens." However, what JP Aerospace envisions is a series of blimps and otherwise inflatable aircraft as stepping stones, eventually floating all the way to orbit. This offers a low-cost, bulk access to space that is scalable from small satellites, to people, to heavy lifting, that is safer than traditional rocket launch vehicles. Most importantly, their Airship To Orbit project is over twenty years old. While the information pdf they have is undated, they state they'll be testing their orbital ion engine in the next five months, testing a crewed vehicle in the next eighteen, and are seven years from completion. Did I mention they were volunteers?
Parralax has 