Interesting project… The BalloonSat Extreme… DIY space program @ The Citizen Scientist…

The goal behind the BalloonSat is to give an individual (or a small group, if the students are very young) the opportunity to create an experiment for near space and then to have it sent there. The student shouldn’t be concerned with launching, tracking, or recovery. He or she should just focus on developing a great experiment that is suitable for the flight into near space.

What if the student wants to develop a fairly complex set of experiments or several students want to collaborate on the construction of a single= airframe for an array of experiments? These situations lead to a BalloonSat that’s big and heavy. Therefore, I have developed a suitable flight computer for such an Extreme BalloonSat that I’ll describe in this column and next month. Appropriately enough, the name of this flight computer is the BalloonSat Extreme.