We have been working towards securing a bit of extra funding to cover the costs of adding some additional people to our launch team. We have been consulting with CASA, the Civil Aviation Safety Authority of Australia about what protocols need to be followed to launch a payload to the edge of space and back. Our ballon will pass through controlled airspace, hence the need to do things safely.
We are working away through the tasks required to get everything in shape for the launch. CASA have introduced us to some software that will help in choosing a safe launch site. Ozrunways is software pilots use to file a flight plan and importantly for us, it has all the aviation maps of Australia. We are also working with some software to help predict the rate of ascent and descent of our balloon under particular payload weights.
I have had a brief chat with local pilot and former colleague at the now defunct School of Contemporary Art, UWS, Jules Gull, who has kindly offered to help us get to know how to read certain bits of unfamiliar aviation data. We are going to be scanning a lot of meteorological stuff throughout this project.
Soon we will be doing some static line drops in the Blue Mountains, to test for various ideas about how to achieve the Aeolian effects in a falling object. We will add documentation of these practice runs as we do them.