The flight was a collaboration between the UI Astronomical Society and Space for All, an organization founded and led by two UI engineering students that provides equipment and expertise for near-space exploration and high-altitude balloon flight.
“Space for All is a group of students who are trying to advocate making near-space exploration more exciting and more accessible,” said Spencer Gore, the founder and director of the group. Space for All serves as a contractor for companies or individuals seeking innovative branding opportunities by flying representative objects to the edge of space. They use the profits to support educational activities to teach high school students about astronomy and near-space flight.
The flight of the “Star Trek” captains was orchestrated by Logan Kugler, an entrepreneur and space enthusiast living in California. He had the idea to send a friend’s Captain Picard action figure into space and added figures of Captain Kirk and popular characters Commander Riker and the android Data, as well as models of the Starship Enterprise from the original series and the “Next Generation” series of “Star Trek.” Kugler funded the project using the crowdsourcing website Kickstarter, then found spaceforall.org when searching for a launch crew.
“Logan first approached us about sending up Kirk and Picard around a month before the launch,” said Gore, a junior from Naperville, Ill., studying aerospace engineering and engineering physics. “Since we’re all matchlessly passionate space geeks, we were instantly on board with the idea and offered to supply the equipment and expertise needed to make it happen.”
With such a short time to prepare for a large-scale launch, Gore approached a friend at the UI Astronomical Society, a registered student organization. The Astronomical Society aims to educate students and the public about the wonders of astronomy, and are the keepers of the UI Observatory and its telescope.
“Spencer asked if we wanted to try something that’s never been done before,” said Mallory Conlon, the president of the Astronomical Society “He made it sound so exciting, I knew we had to do it.”
The students in the two organizations worked closely to develop software and devise a video recording setup to film the entire flight in 3-D, while the UI Synton radio club provided tracking equipment and radio hardware.
In addition to bringing the popular television duo to the brink of the final frontier, the balloon rigging explores new territory in amateur near-space flight. The capsule contained action figures, starship models, five cameras, and advanced GPS and amateur radio trackers.
“It was the most scientifically and technically complex launch that we’ve ever attempted,” Gore said. “We tried a number of new things technically: tracking from the observatory, using a bigger balloon, using new tracking systems. It was a resounding success.”
The morning of May 5, the crew of about a dozen UI students and a handful of high school students loaded up the balloon and launch equipment and drove to Moraine View State Park near Le Roy, Ill., less than an hour west of campus. After about a three-hour flight, the balloon landed in a cornfield near Blue Ridge, Ill., where the crew recovered it. All five cameras on board recorded the flight.
The Astronomical Society planned to achieve a milestone in amateur near-space flight by tracking the entire flight from the UI Observatory. Unfortunately, thanks to the erratic motion of the balloon and the tall angle of the trees on the Quad north of the Observatory, the crew was not able to visually track the flight. Since the May launch, however, the Astronomical Society has teamed with Space for All on other launches and plans to continue the collaboration. Conlon hopes that tracking near-space flights will provide an additional point of excitement for both students and the public, complementing the society’s schedule of speakers, camping trips and monthly open houses at the Observatory.
“As long as Spencer is launching balloons and I’m here, I’m going to be trying to track them. We’re definitely going to keep doing it,” said Conlon, a senior studying astronomy from Bartlett, Ill.
Both the Astronomical Society and Space for All are open to students of all majors, at all levels.
“You meet a lot of people who don’t study the same thing as you but who have the same interests you do,” Conlon said.
“It’s interesting to see those different perspectives come together. Astronomy classes are essentially physics classes, and you sometimes lose sight of why you love astronomy. It gets to be very theoretical – too cognitive. Seeing video shot from near-space, going to the dark site and seeing a meteor, or going on a camping trip and staying up all night looking at the stars and the vastness of the universe – that’s the romanticism of astronomy. It’s like two parts of a whole, and you need both.”
For Gore, involvement in Space for All has kept him firmly grounded.
“If you don’t actually get together with people and build real hardware, fly actual systems and test it out, see what works in theory and what works in practice, then you’re not fully getting everything you can out of your education,” Gore said. “I think that’s incredibly crucial and not something you can really get in the classroom.”