Successful Launch and Recovery!

This post is super late, but we had a successful launch and payload recovery in Sept 2019! We launched from the grounds of a public school NW of Waterloo, and landed in wine country, SE of Hamilton, a journey of ~120km, it was in the air for almost exactly 2 hours. We reached a maximum altitude of 88,405 ft (26,946m).

Our knock-off GoPro camera worked great, we have 2h of 4k video of the entire journey up and down. Launch Video (2min). Landing video (2min). And, the most spectacular video: burst video, from the maximum height:

Here’s some awesome photos of our setup and launch:

Checking the radios
Building up the payload chain
Releasing the balloon!
Up up and away!
In the chase car, with radio antenna out the sunroof
Recovery!
Flight Path (Google Earth, from our logged GPS data)

Download our Full GPS data. You’ll need Google Earth to visualize that (it’s XML data).

Also, thanks to Jen for the last-minute rescue of “oh shit Eric forgot the balloon, we have to turn back and cancel, sorry everyone”. Officially this was the Jen Balloon Launch, she’s the title sponsor :-).