The mission: To launch, via weather balloon, a classroom “Beaker” the Muppet with a class of 100 3rd graders from Park Ride, IL.

We chose a location south of the school, because A) the school is right by O’Hare and B) we wanted to reduce our chances of landing in Lake Michigan. We went as far south as possible, as we had to take into consideration the fact that the students would have to also travel a distance by bus. So we settled on the Lake Whalon Forest Reserve area in Naperville, IL. Beautiful lakeside park, perfect for launching a balloon.

The day was a bit windy, my trusty coordinator/sidekick Dave Lawrence and I struggled with the balloon a bit, but it was manageable.

Photo by Rob Hart of the Chicago Sun Times

Just as we wrapped filling the balloon, the class arrived and we had a lovely little welcome ceremony, music provided from Dave’s eclectic collection of 70′s galactic funk & sci-fi TV themes. We spent some time showing them what would go into the payload and talked about how and why beaker would get so high in the air. We also talked about how we were using GPS & the internet to track the little guy all through his flight.

Photo by Rob Hart of the Chicago Sun Times

Then the BEAKER-I was readied for flight. We turned on the electronics and formed a double wide line of all the kids so every single one of them could let go of the “launch rope.” (A simple little string I tied at one end to our boom box, ran through a key ring on the payload and then had the kids hold on their end, so when released, the string would just slip through the key ring as the balloon rose until it was completely free)

Photo by Rob Hart of the Chicago Sun Times

Photo by Rob Hart of the Chicago Sun Times

Then came time for the countdown & liftoff. We waited for the wind to die down and began the countdown sequence from 5. When we hit 1 all the children jumped back to release the rope and the BEAKER-I magically floated away.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Photo by Rob Hart of the Chicago Sun Times

We tracked the balloon across the sky as it sailed towards Indiana. It was following its predicted path perfectly and was rising at a rate we expected.

Flight Prediction Model

Then the balloon burst about 15,000 feet sooner than expected and it began its descent. We immediately became nervous it would land in the lake, and after about 45 minutes of watching and hoping for the best, that’s unfortunately exactly where it landed. Naturally, the payload took on water and our communication equipment stopped communicating immediately on impact. We waited for it to pick up again, but sadly it did not. We were now on a rescue mission.

Actual flight path via APRS (click to see on Google Map)

APRS Location/Altitude data overlaid in Google Maps (Click to download Google Maps .KML file_

We scrambled, we borrowed a kayak from our friend Katie Luby, (because we had no idea how far out it really was) and we began calling local boat captains. We managed to make a lead with a fine man named Mike Hampel of “Friendly Gesture Charters” and while he was unavailable, he had a friend, Captain Steve Kreighbaum, who was already out there and he offered to go search for a bit with his crew. We headed to Michigan City, IN to meet up with them in the event they found anything. Additionally, Mike called the local media and we were met by Julie McClure from the Michigan City News Dispatch and she collected our tale in hopes of using their paper as a means to inform the community to keep their eyes peeled. We made the printed and online versions of the paper… it was spectacular!

After realizing we stood no chance in that giant lake with no communications, we resigned to the fact we’d have to walk the beach in the AM. Captain Steve gave us a prediction based on his GPS plotter, which was tremendously helpful in narrowing what would’ve been a 40 mile stretch of beach to search, into a 10-11 mile area.

Thursday morning brought cloudy, rainy, windy weather and our search across the beach was set to be a wet & muddy one. In one last desperate attempt when I awoke for the morning, I checked the SPOT tracker location to see if a miracle had struck. Low and behold, a miracle HAD struck and we’d started beaconing again. The cooler was afloat and tracking southwestward/westward across the lake.

The SPOT tracker locations

We immediately contacted Captain Mike, who unfortunately was unavailable again, however, his good friend Captain Rich Pegau WAS available and ready to go. We met him and his crew mate Mike Gray at the Berns Harbor and we set sail. The beacon, while tracking all morning, had naturally gone silent over the course of the last hour, so we went to the last known location and traced a direction it had appeared to be headed. After about 15 minutes and some thought as to how long we should keep these guys out here before we let them get back about their day, Dave suddenly spotted the orange BEAKER-I floating about 200 yards out from the boat.

Click here to view the embedded video.

With a giant sigh of relief, we had found the BEAKER-I and headed back to shore. We thanked the gentlemen for their effort, took a few shots for the record, and we made our way back to the city to get a burger and ensure we hadn’t lost the photos/videos.

When we got back, we were elated to discover all the photos/videos had in fact been saved and we prepared to share them with the kids the following morning at a “Welcome Home Beaker” ceremony at the school.

So, without further adieu, I present the photos/videos from the flight of the BEAKER-1 on May 30th, 2012 from Whalon Lake, IL, landing 6 miles off the coast of Michigan City, IN in Lake Michigan.

Click here to view the embedded video.

After presenting the BEAKER-I back to the class of 100 students at Washington Elementary school, we were both presented with “Badges of Success” and I was even given a book full of hand-written thank you notes from the students (each note also included a drawing of the event… absolutely adorable).

Dave & Jamey wear their "Badges of Success" with pride

An entire book of Thank You's complete with drawings of the event.

And last, but not least, the News Dispatch ran a follow up on Friday sharing our success! Once again, we made the cover!

And last, last last, a real lovely video put together by Dave that we shared with the students at our “Welcome Home Beaker” ceremony. The kids lots their minds when they saw this.

Click here to view the embedded video.

This site will continue to exist as an archive to the BESPIN project, but a new site will pop up shortly for all things pertaining to ISON. In the meantime, you can follow our progress on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/ison_space

So here are some fun tidbits from the final launch.

Map of search area & recover location:

Photos from the flights (sadly, our camera died at 54,000ft, so there’s nothing TOO high):

And lastly, what post would be complete without the fun GOOGLE EARTH data!

http://bespin.sevnthsin.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/flightData/BESPIN_III_20111022.zip

Thanks again for all the fun times everyone. I’ll post some YAVIN IV pics if there’s anything worth sharing from that launch! Looking forward to whatever next year brings!

For those of you just learning of our loss, it happened nearly a month ago at our final launch on October 22nd. We launched from NE Minneapolis, behind the Sevnthsin offices, and it couldn’t have been a more beautiful/perfect day for a launch. Clear skies, no winds and a lovely 70°. Everything went off without a hitch, except the SPOT tracker wasn’t properly activated. We realized this after launch, but didn’t worry to much because knowing where it was to land, we expected to be able to see it in a recently plowed corn field. We reached a max altitude of 116,599ft before the balloon burst for the last time, carrying the BESPIN-III craft to its ultimate resting spot.

In typical fashion, the BigRedBee radio tracker cut out around 4,500ft above ground, when it loses direct line of sight with the closest antenna. So we spent some time studying the last few minutes of the flight path and determining a landing location. While most of the area WAS in fact corn or bean fields, sadly our landing estimate put us right in the midst of some of the thickest woods I’ve ever trekked through. Steep ravines and patches of dense pine trees didn’t help our cause either.

You can see the area we covered over the course of two days. Approximately 6 hours of search time went into covering the woods and surrounding fields, to no avail. Our only other option would be aerial surveillance, which we don’t really have access to. But you’d easily be able to see the balloon/parachute from above, we imagine.

So after a few weeks of waiting hoping some hunters would discover it for us, we’re officially calling an end to the search. Maybe a farmer will come across it while prepping for next years crop. But until we get a phone call, we’re writing the BESPIN-III off as another lost venture.

A few pics from the day. Got some lovely shots next to the moon on our way up. I imagine there’s some great shots from inside the craft of the moon over downtown Minneapolis. But maybe we’ll never see those.

Once again, thanks to everyone involved. It was an amazing project and we had some really great times. For those of you on the Kickstarter campaign still waiting for your last batch of photos, they’ll be mailing here before the end of November. Was hoping to have a hunter call with the location of BESPIN-III before I started mailing anything, but that’s not going to happen.

So if you’re so inclined, join us for one last launch, weather permitting, from behind the Sevnthsin offices (1121 Jackson St NE, Minneapolis, MN), Saturday morning around 10:00am. We’ll start prepping around 9:30 and aim for a 10:00 “Let Go” time, aiming for a recovery sometime after lunch.

Thanks again for all who’ve supported us. We’ve got some exciting things brewing for next year already, more on that when we have some details hammered out.

UPDATE: For those of you worried about us landing in the airport or hitting buildings or any other problems, we’re in the clear. Our flight prediction has us landing over near Eau Claire, we’ll be over 1,000 ft if we go over downtown (which we won’t) and we would be well over the restricted area over the airport by the time we’d get there, even if we did drift that way. This is also why we say “Weather Permitting” because if conditions would take us in a hazardous direction, we’d pick a different location the day of. But so far all signs point to a east/south easterly path and a beautiful clear day.

We launched a few minutes early, around 6:20pm CST and were amazed how perfectly straight up it went for a good part of the launch. We sat and watched it from the launch location well over 75,000ft up, which was astonishing. At that point we decided to head out an begin chase since it was getting high enough to where it could potentially break soon, or at least within the next hour. We headed over to the house to drop off some supplies, condense to one car and begin the chase. We could STILL see it up over the house!

As we headed out down the road, we were about 10 miles south of our launch location and we pulled off to grab some road supplies (snacks, etc) and we looked out, to our surprise, to STILL SEE IT up in the air. So the remainder of the drive I (jamey) sat with my head out the window watching it up in the air. As the balloon rises, it expands, and as the sun was going down, it was reflecting light off the bottom of what was ultimately a 50′ wide balloon. Our max altitude was 118,541 ft up in the air, and I watched it all the way to that height. I looked away for a sec to check altitude on the iPad, and when I looked back, it’d disappeared. So we could see it for the duration of the flight, which was quite impressive.

The descent was fairly painless. A real gradual float back down to the Earth. We had a few scares as it stopped moving any direction but downward over a giant wind farm in southern, MN, and then about 30 minutes later when we realized it was on a path to set down right in the middle of Interstate 90.

After 30 minutes of waiting for the SPOT tracker, we were relieved to see it had nestled down on the edge of an alfalfa field, about 20 years from a tree line. So a bit of a long, moist walk through the field, across a small creek and over a few barbed wire fences, we found it blinking away and happily disassembled the inertia rods and hoed back to the truck. We were a little saddened to see our Kodak camcorder had given us trouble again and somehow froze up 16 minutes after we turned it on. So we have no footage of the flight, only pictures. But the pictures are great and we’ve got them below!

First, a few pics from the chase, the APRS path and a Google Earth KML file to share.

Right off the tip of my finger, you can still see it (this photo doesn’t do it justice, but you get the idea)

Found it!

And lastly, the Flickr Gallery

So that’s what we got. We’ve decided the next launch will be a morning launch and we’ll be shooting for max altitude (130,000+ ft). Stay tuned for more excitement on that front.

We started by getting an even smaller payload box. Something about half the size of what we’re already using. So considering how light we already are, we’re even lighter now. We then got our hands on a hot foam cutter. Little bendable wire so we could custom cut inserts for the cameras into the payload walls (saving us both on space internally while allowing us to eliminate the separate between the lens and the outside of the payload, which should help reduce the fogging issues. We also essentially removed the UV filters, or I should say, we’ve extended them out beyond the payload walls, so we won’t have the issue of warm air inside, cold air outside, all separated by a piece of glass for easy fogging. Lastly, and this is the really big one, after over a year and eight full missions, we’ve retired the SharkFinTail™ technology. It was designed to reduce spin in the payload as we rose, but now understanding a little more about upper oscillatory winds, we realize its not doing us anything whatsoever and maybe causing half the spin problems when we get that high. So we added a new design element we’re calling SpaceArms™. SpaceArms™ act as inertia rods, similar to the bar a tightrope walker holds, to help resist the change in rotational speed. Our new friends over at the EOSS (Edge of Space Sciences) have been doing exactly this and its been working great. I want to also thank Robert Harrison of the Icarus Project, Keith Kaiser from ARHAB, Marshall Dias over at the iHab Project and of course, Rick Erickson (my Dad the engineer) for all their valuable input as I rebuilt this thing.

So, now on to the pics. Here’s some shots of what we’re working with now. We’re streamlined a bit and are going with JUST the essentials. Camera, Camcorder, Big Red Bee, SPOT tracker, Batter Backup, Pilot & BeepX (in the lid). Its still a chunk of equipment, but its a tiny little payload, approximately 6.5″x 8″ with an internal space of 4.5″ x 6″.

The BESPIN-III Itself

From the Top Down. You can see the BeepX

Everything nestled nice & cozy.

You can see the pockets we’ve cut to nestle the cameras.

So there it is. Don’t forget to follow along on Saturday evening via Twitter. We’ll share live updates as well as link out to the APRS Tracking page.
http://twitter.com/besp1n

We launched from just east of Mantorville, MN, my hometown growing up. Attendees were Rick Erickson (Dad), Cindy Erickson (Mom) and my (Jamey) old 7th grade science teacher Mr Bruce Kinlund. Was great to have Bruce out there, because A) I hadn’t seen him in easily 12 years and B) having been such a science geek in his classes way back in the day, it was fun to share a little experiment of my own with him outside the old classroom setting.

Our goal was to launch right around 7:30pm with a planned max altitude around 9:00pm, giving us the opportunity to snag some shots of the moon coming up over the horizon after some amazing shots of the sun going down on the other horizon. We kinda got what we wanted, but for a second launch in a row, we had problems with moisture inside the cooler and the windows fogging. We think we’re over-thinking the problem and actually need to get less air tight so we’re not trapping the more humid air inside, so although we have a handful of great shots, we didn’t get some of the best shots we could’ve because of the icing on the windows, BUT now we have two cases where we were trying to up the air-tightness and the conditions worsened, so we now know our solution.

The launch itself was successful. Right on time at 7:30, no real winds on the ground, no problems filling the balloon, plenty of lift, etc. It headed straight south for the first little bit, snapping some shots of my old stomping grounds around Mantorville, Kasson, Byron and Rochester, MN, before hitting the jet stream and rocketing around 85ph eastward past Rochester and over towards St. Charles, MN. We chased it all the way over to St. Charles before, as we should have expected, it started to come back. It continued to rise steadily until precisely 116,000ft up. It was right up over my Grandparents’ place southeast of Rochester when we realized the climb had pretty much stopped and it was hovering… much like the lost BESPIN-I on June 25th. There was some cursing, some frustration, but we continued to follow for over an hour as it raced at around 45mph back west towards South Dakota. “Here we go again,” we thought. When we got to the town of Hayfield, MN, at approximately 10:00 on the nose, we were about 20 minutes from our original launch location and made a deal with ourselves. We’d sit in the parking lot of the gas station until 10:30 and see what happened, if nothing changed, we’d just head home and look for the SPOT tracker in the morning, as we know that’d pull a signal for at least 48 hours or so. Just as we were giving up hope, at 10:28 we saw two drastic drops in altitude back to back. The balloon had finally burst and it was coming back down. We raced westward, of course only to have to backtrack to almost the exact location we’d just been sitting, and are pretty sure we saw it’s flashing lights from about a half-mile away as it was coming down right over a bean field. Bean fields, for those of you who don’t know, are typically only about knee high and naturally make these sorts of things pretty easy to locate. We then got ourselves as close as we could via gravel minimum maintenance county roads, and waited for the SPOT to send its final location. After about 20 minutes of nothing, we figured, “Hell, we’ll see it flashing or hear the beeper once we get out in the bean field here.” After about a half hour or so of walking, in the din of grasshoppers and frogs, we could not only hear nothing, but we still hadn’t seen a flash or a location update from the SPOT. We continued forward, thinking we just hadn’t gone far enough yet, when suddenly we got a SPOT location. We were about half way there, so we picked up the pace. 15 minutes later, still no sounds or obvious flashing lights. We panned the crop-tops with our flashlights, looking for the parachute or SOME sign of a crash down in the field. We saw a car coming on the next county road down, so we shut down the flashlights as to not draw the attention of local law enforcement or farmers with shotguns, and then suddenly like a gift from above (see what I did there), we saw a very faint flashing about 40 yards southeast of us. We bolted over there and found our payload. It was all there and in brilliant condition, except the beeper battery had somehow died (note to self, change beeper battery after EVERY flight) and one of the flashing bike lights had also died. NO WONDER WE COULDN’T HEAR/SEE IT!

After all was said and done, our max altitude for the evening was 116,812ft up (or 22.12 miles), it was about 11:45pm when we finally found it and we were back at home by 12:30am. We got some good stuff, learned a few more lessons and of course, want to share it all with you.

First, the flight path via APRS (click the image for the actual Google Map)

You can snag the Google Earth KMZ file here, showing not only the path but the altitude as well: http://bespin.sevnthsin.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/flightData/BESPIN_II_20110819.zip

Then we’ve got some edited video from the flight. Launch, couple sunset views, a pass of the moon (somewhat out of focus, sadly), then the bean field landing.

Click here to view the embedded video.

And lastly, some great pics (note some of them are through some ice, but hey, they still look cool).

Sadly we didn’t get the quality shots of the moon we’d hoped to get, but we have another plan for that coming up on our next launch. So enjoy and stay tuned for the next launch, happening in September.

We launched from right over by the Delano Water Tower, as we felt comfortable the wind direction would take us away from the tower and over the power lines no problem, yet still provide a great opportunity to get a shot of Bruce’s house from above… which we successfully accomplished.

We sat in the park and watched it sail up over 25,000ft before it slipped behind a cloud, obscuring our vision. After that point it was so small we didn’t bother trying to find it again and just hopped in the car to go get coffee along the chase route. Its fun when the days are that clear and you can watch it get that high.

So we hit up a local coffee shop in Waconia and were enjoying our drinks, watching it travel towards Prior Lake via APRS.fi on our iPad. After a couple minutes in the comfy chairs, we saw it drop in altitude quite drastically and we realized it had burst… quite early. We hit a max altitude of 88,403ft up in the air, over near Prior Lake, then it sailed gently back down to the ground via the new bigger parachute we’d attached. As we watched its descent we got rather excited as it got to nearly ground level, as it was headed right over a golf course. What a perfect place to land. After the SPOT kicked in we saw it should be right on the edge of someone’s lawn right off the edge of a tee box at the golf course. So, we decided to hit up the residence and see if we could snag it that way. The couple was more than happy to let us wanter around (they even got out their camera and shot some pics of us), but just as we thought to ourselves “This is gonna be an easy one,” we discovered the BESPIN II high up in a tree. Fortunately the owner had an extension ladder and a 10ft pruner we were able to use to cut it all down and go on about our way. Aside from almost falling from about 20 ft up on more than one occasion during the cut down process, it was a fairly simple extraction process.

The up side was it was a beautiful day, we had a blast chasing it, the recovery was easier than some in the past and we got some GREAT video. The DOWN side was that we didn’t get as high as we’d hoped and we had some serious issues with fog on the still camera lens for some reason and got NO photos of any value from above the clouds. We think the new hole we added for the Sonic BeepX device was just enough to cause the fogging issues combined with the high humidity in the air that day was too much for the lone desiccant packet. So we’re going to try and solve for that this upcoming Friday when we launch again.

Either way, still a great way to spend a Saturday and we got some really great video from the launch. Here’s a fun little snippet from the day as well as a Google Earth KMZ file of the flight path & altitude.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Now, since we’ve got the equipment back in our hands, we can finally post some photos/videos from the first mission to space and back. The max altitude for this, that we know of, was 108,000ft up. Not as high as we’ve gone, but still pretty impressive. But enough about that, on to the photos.

Here’s Dr. David Bowman giving us the thumbs up as he’s helped out of the capsule.

And here’s the Flickr Gallery of great shots.

And lastly, a link to some video if you’re so inclined – http://yfrog.com/iz2jfgz

So for those of you who remember, we launched from Lake Elmo, MN, the BESPIN I craft sailed up and over towards Eau Claire, WI, then suddenly turned around and started sailing westward around the metro area and down towards Sioux Falls, SD before the batteries in our GPS died and we lost contact with it. Its been missing since June 26th, 2011. Well below you can see how far the little guy actually traveled. Pretty impressive, that’s for sure.

We launched at precisely 10:38am from just southeast of the small town in southwestern Minnesota, with the expectation (based on Jet Stream forecasts) that it would said northeasterly and land somewhere not far from my parents’ place and we’d be close to home after the chase. Well, similary to last weekend, it did NOT do that. It went east for about 45 minutes, then turned around and headed back west, past our launch point, and then burst, descended and came back eastward, landing about 2 miles northwest of our actual launch point.

All said and done it was up in the air for just over 2 hours and hit a whopping 121,500ft up in the air! WOW! THAT’S HIGH! We even over filled the balloon a bit this time (considering last weekend’s fiasco, we wanted to make DAMNED sure we didn’t get stuck up there again). So next launch we’ll dial it back just a little bit and see if we can get ever higher!

NOW, for the good stuff… the recovery. We chased it down as it raced back down to the earth, and at one point we were actrually underneath it and had we known where exactly to look, I’m pretty sure we could’ve spotted it, had it been parachuting down. I say, “Had it been parachuting” because when we found it, the parachute, radar reflector and balloon were nowhere to be found, but the connecting string was wound so tight it clearly spun itself to a snapping point somewhere during the descent. Knowing what we know from the last few minutes we have on APRS and seeing the last minutes of video, we think it broke off somewhere during the last 2 minutes and was travelling approximately 24-28mph when it slammed down smack dab in the middle of the river. Nothing but soy bean and corn fields for miles and miles, and we land in the middle of a river, in a stretch of woods barely wider then the length of a football field. What luck!

We lost contact with the balloon on APRS at around 5,800ft, so we drove over to its anticipated landing point, and waited for the new SPOT tracker to drop us a location. After about 20-30 mins, and no location from the SPOT, we decided to head out into the fields to see what we could find. After some scouring and estimating, we realized we were going to have to brave the mosquito ridden woods and consider swimming the river. After about 45 minutes wandering through the woods, getting separated and nearly giving up on account of the massive mosquito beating we were taking, I wound up back at the cars on the phone with my two other chasers, trying to direct them back to where we were parked. Out of sheer frustration of an hour or so of trekking through the thorns and bugs and nettles and muggy forrest air, I pulled the iPad out in one last desperation “reload” of the SPOT tracking map. BAM! THERE IT WAS! 3 miunutes ago it’d checked in… but it was right on the edge of the river. I abandoned our rendevous point and headed to the river alone, quickly realizing there was no good way to get to the river, due to 30ft cliffs on the side we were on. Again, the woods were SO thick you just couldn’t even see if there was anything down there anyway. So I wandered north for a bit, found slope I could handle, got down by the river, and realized there was no avoiding going in. Dropped my shorts, took off my shirt, threw my shoes and phone on the ground and hopped in. The water was deep, the current was strong, but I had a feeling the “other side” was where I needed to be. After another 20 minutes of wandering the opposite side of the river, 3/4 naked in soaked boxers, barefoot and Indiana Jones-ing my way through knee high nettles with a giant stick, I heard a voice from across the river. My dad had come looking for me, and suddenly between our “Can you see me? No? I’m right here? No? How about now?” exchange, I heard him holler “HEY! I SEE IT!” I then lept back into the water and drifted out to the giant tree tipped into the river, that was gently cradleing the BESPIN II in one of its many arms. After dumping the water, swimming back to my shoes/shorts with one arm and trekking back up to the car, we were finally on our way.

What a day indeed! WOW!

So, without further adeiu, I present some pretty amazing photos & video from today’s successful* launch.

The launch itself.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The last 2 minutes, from 121,550ft up!

Click here to view the embedded video.

The final descent with epic splashdown.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Some photos from the launch.

LASTLY, a Google Earth KMZ file of the launch plus altitude. Pretty sweet to look at!
BESPIN_II_20110702.zip