NEARSPACE
APPROACHING THE FINAL FRONTIER
■ BY L. PAUL VERHAGE
THE NEAR SPACE VENTURES
■ FIGURE 1
WEBPAGE
NEAR SPACE VENTURES IS THE
WEBPAGE OF an amateur radio high
altitude balloon (ARHAB) and Civil Air
Patrol (CAP) organization named
CAPnSPACE. CAPnSPACE has developed
a great website that I’d like to share
with you this month. But first, let me
tell you how I met the Campbells, the
founders of CAPnSPACE.
They were attending the Great
Plains Super Launch in 2004 —
their first near space event — to see
how high altitude ballooning was
done. Since they had nothing else to
do other than watch, I put them to
work filling and launching my balloon.
(That just goes to show that if I see
you hanging around very long, I’ll put
you to work!) Since then, we’ve been
good friends.
Visit the CAPnSPACE website for
reports on their past launches, information on their currently planned
launches, and the software tools
needed to make near space flight
predictions. The part of their website I
like best is its selection of online prediction applications. Before I describe
how to use those apps, I’ll briefly
introduce the rest of their website.
The top of their website shows
the following convenient links:
• Home appears throughout the
website and it takes you back to the
homepage no matter where you are.
• Articles takes you to page that has 15
categories of articles that CAPnSPACE
86 May 2007
currently maintains. Currently, the
only archived articles are in
Announcement. That’s not surprising
since their website is fairly new and
CAPnSPACE has concentrated on
developing their online applications.
• Forums takes you to a discussion
board.
• Links is currently empty, but ready to
network with other valuable websites.
• Downloads is a page listing 36 near
space presentations.
Below the top row of links are
three columns of additional links. I’ll
describe the important aspects of
each column.
In the left column is a series of
links to things like Mission Status,
Image Gallery, and some of the items
already described at the top of the
homepage.
• Mission Status contains information
on the payloads CAPnSPACE is preparing to launch, the frequencies they’ll
use, and the current weather report.
• Image Gallery is a set of folders for
each CAPnSPACE mission, project,
and workshop, containing photo
albums of all of their activities.
In the center column are links to
messages. They are brief but you
may post your own comment after
reading them.
My favorite part of the website is
the right column. Here is where you’ll
find links to their two online flight
prediction applications. I go here to
make predictions for my near space
missions, specifically, the expected
flight path and recovery zone. Even if
you’re not ready to launch a near
spacecraft, you should check out these
applications — they may encourage you
to launch your own near spacecraft!
Making a near space flight prediction at CAPnSPACE is simple. You start
by running the Ascent Rate Calculator
to determine how fast the near
spacecraft will climb. Then you run
the Flight Track Prediction Utility to
predict the flight path and recovery
zone of the mission. If you’re not
happy with the predicted flight path
and recovery zone, you have a few
