Accidented start for the autumn balloon campaign at Sanriku (8/30/2007)

Sanriku, Japan.- A balloon launched on August 30th from the Sanriku Balloon Center failed to destroy itself at the end of the flight, and forced the Aviation Authority to divert several domestic flights to avoid a risk of colision with the wandering deflated gas bag.

The balloon -a B50 model with a full capacity of 50.000 cubic meters- was launched from the base at 6:02 local time, and after a succesfull flight was separated from the payload near 9:00 but instead to burst it remained at flight altitude. The payload landed in the sea 20 km from Iwate coast, but the balloon while descending entered overland (remember that due to high population density Japan's balloon program uses the ocean as landing site for both balloon and payload) and hit the ground near a town called Towadako.

The Japan's FAA had to divert 7 planes from the area while the balloon (measuring 50 meters in diameter and with a weight of near 300 pounds) was landing. Next day JAXA published in their Japanese home page their apologies by the incident and promised to start an investigation on the causes of the failure.

The balloon was the first one to be launched on the autumn campaign (which will be last until september 22th) and was a flight to analize the performance of an automatic system to control the end of flight as well to test a fuelcell destined to be used on superpressure balloons.

Ultra Long Duration Balloon: a new hope (8/8/2007)

Weeksville, North Carolina.- The succesful indoor inflation test of a scaled version of the future Ultra Long Duration Balloon (ULDB) being developed by NASA's Balloon Program Office since 1997, had put a considerable amount of fresh air to the project. The test was carried out at the end of July, inside the huge blimp hangar located at TCOM's facility in Weeksville, North Carolina, a historical site of the US Airship golden age formerly known as NAS Weeksville.

The ULDB is a project devoted to develope a balloon system capable of providing scientific measurements for 100-day missions with a floating altitude close to 35km. The key of the system of course is the super-pressure balloon wich is filled with Helium and hermetically sealed. Meridional tendons provide additional rigidity to the envelope and the pressure inside is maintained above the ambient pressure at all times to keep the balloon afloat at a constant altitude. Once cruising in the stratosphere, is expected that made a full circle to the Earth's in about 2 weeks.

The program advanced steadily during years, scaling up the balloon sizes and improving materials and building techniques, but suffered several setbacks esentially related to test balloon flights failing to fully deploy or even leaking. After the last failure in Sweden in 2006 -then fully covered by Stratocat- a deep investigation found a clue to the problem and succedeed in reproduce the deploy anomaly in a indoor test carried out too in Weeksville on March 2007. A subsequent review of the ULDB's design lead -as several sources had suggested years before- to a flattening of the gores which bulge when pressurized as a solution to the issue. As tested, if the bulge is too exaggerated (as clearly occured in past test flights) the balloon have too much excess material thus not allowing a properly deploy.

The test done past week in Weeksville, succeded to full inflate and deploy a 23 meter scaled down test model of the future ULDB. This "miniature" is a design considered to be as big as possible to be tested indoors, as well as small as possible and still be able to fly a 20 kg payload to 100,000 feet. The following step would be to launch a test balloon of this same size as a "pathfinder" in the next Antarctic campaign, before the next scaling-up of the program in the summer of 2008 with the flight of another 6.000.000 cuft test balloon similar to the last year's failed flight, also in a transatlantic travel from Sweden to Canada.

Actually the NASA's ULDB roadmap calls for a first operational flight in 2010 with a 22.000.000 cuft balloon and a full scale first flight with the 30.000.000 cuft two years later.

A project to increase Japan's balloon launch capabilities (8/1/2007)

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) is embarked in the expansion of the national program on stratospheric balloons. Recently, during a International Workshop on Cosmic-rays and High Energy Universe held at the Aoyama Campus of Aoyama Gakuin University (Tokyo), Tetsuya Yoshida made a lecture entitled "Ballooning activities in Japan" on wich besides the history of the advances in the field and an overview of the new developments (specially in ultra thin balloons), he gave details on the new launch base that will complement the Sanriku Balloon Center in launching balloons far beyond 500.000 m3 of volume.

The new facility will be located in the small village of Taiki, in the east coast of Hokkaido, where now is the "Multipurpose Aviation Park" wich JAXA uses to test a huge airship in the framework of the SFP (Stratospheric Platform) program. The airfield is located a few meters from the ocean shore, have a paved airstrip 60 meters wide and 1000 meters long, a huge hangar and ample room originally conceived for SFP, but also very usefull to manage big balloons and heavy payloads.

Although the ample room would make think that the choosen launch method for future balloon flights would be the dynamic method, using some specially fitted vehicle to assist in the manouver, the JAXA's technicians had choosen an original approach: they will mount the launch spool that holds the balloon during inflation over a slide, allowing to inflate the balloon inside the hangar and once launch approved, slide it out. To hold the payload during the pre-launch procedures it will be used a movable platform identical to the platform being used now at Sanriku, but it will be mounted also over slides, to allow move the payload back and forth depending on the longitude of the flight train.

The new launch base is intended to be operating by May 2008 and will serve to better satisfy the requests from balloon users in the Japanese scientific community.