RPI-SEDS High-Altitude Balloon

Raised about $1,000 and flew 3 cameras to 89,777 feet to make a 360° video of the edge of space, for RPI’s chapter of Students for the Exploration and Development of Space.

In the fall of 2010, I founded a chapter of Students for the Exploration and Development of Space (SEDS) at Rensselaer. A new club with no budget needed a first project it could pull off, so we chose a high-altitude weather balloon, and then made it harder: three cameras, mounted 120° apart, to stitch the flight into a video you could look around in.

We raised about $1,000 from Rensselaer’s Mechanical, Aerospace, and Nuclear Engineering department, local companies, and family. Greg Pitner and I built the payload over winter break: a foam block holding three GoPros, an APRS radio tracker, and hand warmers to keep the batteries alive in the stratosphere.

We launched from the Class of ’86 Field at 8:29 a.m. on January 28, 2012. The balloon crossed Vermont, reached about 153 mph in the jet stream, and burst at 89,777 feet over New Hampshire around 11 a.m.

Half an hour later, the payload landed in a tree near Steep Falls, Maine. My car broke down on I-91 during the chase. Brian Jennings and his brother Chris reached the payload first, and then Brian lost his car keys in the forest.

We caught up with them around 9 p.m. at a convenience store in Steep Falls, where Greg downloaded the footage to his laptop. We saw space, and it was beautiful.

Three weeks later, we published the stitched 360° video, which I believe was the first interactive panoramic video of a balloon flight to near space. The flattened video is on YouTube, and the radio tracker’s raw flight log is a CSV file.

I wrote about it at the time, in Reaching Space and An Unprecedented View of Earth & Space.

Built with the founding members of RPI-SEDS: Alan Carey, Zachary Clapper, Nic Gaudio, Jon Huang, Brian Jennings, Anson Koch, Jeff Mockelman, Mack Ott, Greg Pitner, Matt Scorza, Paul Sicard, Aaron Valentine.