Mission 3: Success (sort of)
Due to some rather poor judgement from my sleep deprived mind, this morning was much more chaotic than I could have ever imagined. It ended up being one hour before I was meant to be releasing the balloon, and I still hadn’t made a harness for the housing. Since I had cut the hole for the GoPro in the wrong place last night, I had to redesign the harness and quickly take it to The Cottage Shop and beg and plead for them to help me out. And they did. Gavin (who runs the shop with his mom), was absolutely incredible and got the entire harness built in an hour and a half, which was by no means an easy feat.
Once that was done I had to rush through to Intermet as fast as possible, as my parents were waiting in Caledon for the balloon, and were attempting to film the parachute coming down, and I was running four hours late! I had kept Michael and Thomas Knemeyer waiting for such a long time and I felt really bad, however I knew that it was a case of poor judgement and loads of bad luck. I got everything set up super quickly and finally launched the balloon, with Thomas taking photos for the media. After the balloon had launched, I realized that one of the cameras that I had been recording with, had failed to stay on, so I was only able to get one recording of the launch. On top of this, the tracking system that was built for this project failed on all fronts, although none of the problems could have been foreseen and it was just bad luck that both the primary and backup GPS stopped updating their positions. Once I was able to get the GPS signal back up, I found out that for some reason the balloon that had only just been launched was on its way down. Panic-stricken, I called my parents and told them to do an about turn and rush to the new and completely unplanned landing point. Luckily, the parachute we had finished building only hours before worked like a dream, and it safely brought the payload down to earth.
Upon arrival, my parents discovered that the balloon had not burst, but rather the string had snapped at 11km up, which was the reason for the premature descent.
Once everyone was home safe, I checked the photos and videos, only to find that the GoPro had stopped recording after 15 seconds of video, whilst I was placing it in the box. The backup GPS decided to start sending a signal only after it arrived home, and the recovery team’s GPS didn’t start until hours afterwards, when it was too late.
I say success, since we got everything back, which is what counts, however the mission itself was a bit of a flop. There was just a lot of bad luck involved with this one, which is only natural, as the last two launches were extremely lucky. Although a bit of a fail, it was able to get some cool photos of Cape Town and the east coast, although it did not reach the edge of space, which was its objective.
Although a flop, this launch caught the attention of a guy called Tom Van Den Bon, who is one of the leaders of a group in Johannesburg, called BinarySpace2 Program. The members of this group are all high altitude balloon enthusiasts and professionals, and seem to know everything about this kind of thing. Tom took a liking to my project, and was incredibly helpful and gave me multiple tips and tricks, and even added me to the BinarySpace2 group, so that I can ask all the professionals anything I want if I have any questions! He told me that they make their own trackers using an Arduino PCB and then solder components on themselves. Seeing as my time with Intermet is coming to an end, and I do not want to impose on them anymore, I thought it might be a good idea to maybe build one, although I have no expertise whatsoever, and I don’t have a radio HAM license, which is required, as I will be broadcasting over a public frequency and need to be able to identify my signal. After a few hours of chatting with Tom, I thanked him for all his help, and said I would keep him posted on all my work.
Another person contacted me, this time a student from Bangladesh, who saw my post and wanted to know a bit more about the project, as he wanted to do something like this for his project, and be the first in his country to do so! I told him all he wanted to know and he was insanely grateful. I guess now I know what it feels like to be on the other side of all the donations…
Tomorrow’s weather conditions are good, so I will redo this launch and make sure everything happens properly this time. This will be done from the airport, which will be a first, and since everything is already set up from today’s launch, tomorrow should go a lot better.
