Australian Balloon Launch Station, Alice Spring
Located in the heart of the big island, the Australian Balloon Launch Station at Alice Spring is currently the only site still active to perform stratospheric balloon launches in that country. The southern location of the island is very advantageous for the observation of the galactic center and other astronomical objectives that cannot be studied from the North hemisphere. Proof of this lies in the great amount of flights made there after the discovery of SN1987A supernova in the late 80's.
The installation is managed by the School of Physics of Australian Defence Force Academy (ADFA) under the supervision of the New South Wales University, but the main user is the NASA's balloon programe through a special use agreement.
The launch facilities use a sector located in the northwest side of the airport of Alice Spring, denominated "Seven Mile" wich during World War II was an old military installation. There lies an hangar addapted for the integration of payloads and gondolas to be flown.
The low population density was a key factor to choose the site, because this help to reduce the risks of an accidental landing causing human or propiety damage, and allowing to use bigger balloons to fly heavier payloads.
Most of the flights are local ones and cross the continent due west, but in a few cases were launched long duration transcontinental flights. For the later ones, launch operations take place between half December and end January when the winds are very stable to allow a minimum variation in the latitude of displacement of the balloon. During the decade of 80's, several such flights were succesfully acomplished, whose trajectory thanks to prevailing winds at that time was always towards the west. After a flight of 8 to 12 days at heights between 22 km (night) and 39 km (day) the ejection and recovery of the gondola took place over South America thanks to another agreement with the balloon sector at Brazil's space Agency (INPE) for the tracking and recovery tasks. We don't know if this agreement is still today effective.
In the last years, were done there several tests of the new NASA's Ultra Long Duration Balloon (ULDB). Originally conceived to remain in flight near 100 days, crossing all the southern hemisphere in a transoceanic flight, until now the repeated attempts with this new balloon had failed due to structural faults wich had forced to put the craft under a deep redesign.
From the last launches in 2003 an "impasse" took place by two main reasons, on one hand the intergovernmental agreement between Australia and the U.S.A. for the accomplishment of these activities ended. However, in June of 2005, the local government has presented his intention to renew this agreement for these operations by resumed. In the other, the NASA's balloon program decided to cancel the missions from Australia until 2007, to balance its accounts after extraordinary expenses that demanded the works of improvement of the Antarctic balloon facilities.
