MIT goes to near space for $150

[Mike]

For anyone that wants to do this kind of thing and is in the Florida area, check out the Florida Space Grant Consortium's Space Academy. It's a 5 day or so long program. They put you up in a hotel in Cocoa Beach and for two days you get pretty behind-the-scenes tours around Cape Canaveral and Kennedy Space Center: Orbiter Processing Facility, Vehicle Assembly Building, International Space Station Processing Facility, etc. etc.

For the other two days you design a meteorological balloon payload consisting of a GPS and camera system. On the last day it is attached to a weather balloon and launched. From the ground station you get to watch the video and track the balloon across Google Earth (using a particular programmers snazzy tracking software ). I did it in March of '09 and we had video transmission up to about 100,000 feet, when you can start seeing the division between "space" and the stratosphere.

It is a great networking opportunity as well. The people that I met during my 5 day workshop led to a summer internship at Kennedy, which led to me designing some tracking software for FSGC.

Check it out, http://spaceflorida.gov/undergrad.php

PS: Hey Mr. B