flight

Spanish students beat NASA

Spanish students beat NASA

A group of student makers took kite arial photography to a new level: weather balloon photography. They certainly are undercutting NASA’s budget, spending very little on their project, and fabricating most of the structure and electronics themselves. Check out Gareth’s previous entry on the project. Mail Online has a decent writeup. Nice of them to […]

Meteotek high-altitude balloon project

Meteotek high-altitude balloon project

Meteotek is a Spanish high school project to build a meteorological sounding balloon equipped with temperature and pressure sensors, GPS, radio, and a still camera. They had a successful launched on February 28, 2009. Their Flickr pages are in (Catalan) Spanish, but the photos speak for themselves. It’s just endlessly amazing to me that the […]

Teddies in near space

Teddies in near space

MAKE reader James Coxon emailed to tell us about the recent Cambridge University Spaceflight project that teamed up university students with kids from the SPARKS science club to send four teddy bears aloft via helium filled high altitude balloon. The aim of the experiment was to determine which materials provided the best insulation against the […]

High power rocket pics

High power rocket pics

Erik Charlton has some nice pics on Flickr of his NAR Level 3 Certification flight at the recent Rocket Mavericks event. The rocket he flew is a 10″ Polecat Bullpup which is 80 lbs and 110″ tall. It flew to 4,500 feet on an Aerotech M1419 motor with twin G Wiz LCX flight computers. Liftoff

Quadcopters video

Via DIY Drones comes this video of the Stanford STARMAC (Stanford Testbed of Autonomous Rotorcraft for Multi-Agent) quadcopters: STARMAC, the Stanford Testbed of Autonomous Rotorcraft for Multi-Agent is a testbed of 6 quadrotor helicopter unmanned aerial vehicles that fly indoors and outdoors to experiment with autonomous agent algorithms. This video presents an overview of the […]