its usually the reporters that call it "the edge of space" even the author calls it the stratosphere. I'm part of that Alberta HD video balloon group. We like to call it "Near Space" which is defined as: "Near space is the region of Earth's atmosphere that lies between 65,000 and 325,000-350,000 feet (20 to 100 km) above sea level, encompassing the stratosphere, mesosphere, and thermosphere." We're not in space, but were way up there!

Can't convince those that are sure they're right, so I won't try... But for others that are interested, there are 2 problems with heat doing a launch like this... 1: it gets cold up there! Batteries don't like to put out power when they get cold, so only Lithium batteries are used. As well the package is insulated to keep things from freezing up on the way up. 2: once your "up" there, the air pressure is much less, the equipment dissipates energy which causes heat, but now since there is no air to carry the heat away, electronics start to get very very hot... at this point you almost need a radiation surface to dissipate the heat. Coming back down we get into thicker air, now we lose heat again due to conduction and convection and get cold again, there was Ice crystalized on the GPS unit when I opened the first package. Very large temperature swings on these flights.

Yep, we faked the whole thing, the Video, the launch, the construction of the payload and package, the other 6 launches we've been associated with and their video's / data... Not to mention the GPS data, it was tough but we faked that too, and the cameraman and producer from Daily Planet, they were tougher, but we still convinced them! http://watch.discoverychannel.ca/daily-planet/september-2009/daily-planet-september-18-2009/#clip215393 Skip forward to the 10 minute mark for our story... now they faked some things, silly tv people and their cut and paste... Whew... after all that work faking everything, it might just have been easier if we actually did it! lol...

Thank you. I blame YouTube in part for the jerky video, as well yes, there were MANY things we COULD have done in order to try to stabilize the camera, Gyro's, Fins, etc..etc..etc... Don't think that many wern't considered (you don't go sending a $1000 camera & spending the time/money doing this on a whim) but when it comes down to it KISS won out. at 107K feet fins don't help, no real air to push against, a gyro might have helped though, but the package was kept small for a reason. External fins might also have gotten tangled in the parachute lines after burst, so we kept this one nice and simple. Looking at the video after recovery, I never knew the decent was so rough! I'm actually suprised it survived. Some of our previous launches have gone higher, some lower, each one is a little different and unique. The next one will have more stable video, the wings will help with that... More into on this and our other flights at: http://bear.sbszoo.com/bear3-4/bear4.htm and http://bear.sbszoo.com/

We did fill it with Hydrogen...

Um... no, the altimeter was GPS based... (its my GPS) The camera's power supply is what we suspect was interfering with the GPS's ability to get a 3D fix during the first part of the flight, as the battery voltage began to drop the converters frequency shifted, the interference cleared and we got a good lock.

shhhhh! If you read over our website http://bear.sbszoo.com/bear3-4/bear4.htm you'd see thats allready in the works... ;) The thought of adding a tail for stabilization was there, just never implimented, its always shoulda/coulda after the fact lol, next time will be different/better/bigger! Gyro's may have been a option, but powering one over the full 4.5hr flight, and having one that would work at -30C and at that altitude would be another challenge. We were just happy to have the camera work the whole time!