Spacebits on Meo Kanal
If you’re a Meo subscriber in Portugal you can now watch our TV channel at Meo Kanal. Just press the green button followed by 744566 and enjoy our video gallery in fullscreen and HD glory while sitting at your couch.
Yeast-Powered Space Travel
“YouTube Space Lab is about space. We believe that space is more exciting and accessible than ever. On this channel, you can discover space by watching the amazing videos we find from across YouTube. If you’re 14-18 years old, we’re also challenging you to come up with a science experiment which could be streamed live [...]
iPad Survives 100,000+ Foot Fall
Now, this is better marketing than will it blend. “G-Form, a company well known for delivering the most extreme electronics cases and athletic pads, launched an iPad clad solely in the company’s 6oz Extreme Edge case into space and then let it free-fall back to Earth.” Check the video here
Spacebits at SXSW 2012
Early this year we submitted what seemed a very unlikely scenario: a panel proposal to speak at SXSW 2012. SXSW Interactive takes place in Austin, Texas US and is currently one of largest conferences for creators and entrepreneurs in the world, taking the city down for five incredibly non-stop frenetic days featuring hundreds of panels [...]
New Website
Our new website is up.
You can expect lots of new content here for the next weeks. Some of our most technical pages are a bit outdated and we’ll be updating them with the latest information and learnings.
Also, we’ve decided that we’ll be using this Blog as a tool to promote all things amateur near space projects so expect the occasional post about the latest cool project we found that inspired us.
Hope you like it! Stay tuned.
Flight #6
We arrived Friday at the Serra da Estrela chalets and started to unpack and prepare the Spacebits payload. In the past, we had done five flights, and recovered all of them, but we never had a perfect flight. Between software bugs, cameras that stopped working and many other small problems, we collected a list of DOs & DON‘Ts. With two days ahead of us there was enough time to solve them all and to improve the design. We worked hard to cover and improve every failure scenario that we thought. But it seems it wasn’t enough. Read ahead.
Flight #6 public invitation
No dia 26 de Junho vamos fazer mais um voo Spacebits, o nosso sexto. E desta vez, tendo em conta que temos até à data 100% de taxa de sucesso com cinco voo feitos, decidimos ir “extreme” e aumentar drasticamente a dificuldade da tarefa de recuperação do payload. Como tal escolhemos um local mítico de Portugal para o fazer: na Serra da Estrela no seu ponto mais alto, a Torre.
Flights #3, #4 and #5
On the 23rd of October, the Spacebits team did something of epic proportions. Thanks to the amazing support and sponsorship of SAPO.PT, we organized an unique event and simultaneously launched 3 high altitude balloons all from one single place.
It took us a few weeks to put everything together. We began by inviting every geek and hacker at SAPO.PT to join the team and work with us to accomplish our mission. The first two weeks were dedicated to a few sessions to explain all our learnings from Spacebits 1 and 2 flights to all our new team members. Soon after, everyone was working hard with us. We got a lot of great feedback on how to improve our payload aerodynamics, calculate the right amount of helium for each balloon, predict the crash spots, making the “todo” lists, etc. It was like having all the best city physicians, mechanics and engineers working with you. Dream team.
Flight #2
On the 11th of August we quietly launched the Spacebits 2 balloon, it was planned since our first flight to correct the problems we had and prove that our initial design worked. In case you don’t remember, althoughSpacebits 1 was a success, we had major last minute troubles with the main computer which included the telemetry and the main radio (read the story here for details if you haven’t yet).
Fligh #1, the untold story
The 30th of May was a memorable day for all of us. After several months of planning, researching and developing our project, after countless hours of work, E-mails to the project list, conference calls, paperwork and authorizations, and 4 amazing weekend team meetings, we finally launched Spacebits 1. Our expectations were high, and so were our anxiety levels. We knew that we were ready to go, we did our best in testing out everything over the last weeks, but we also knew that we were dealing with an unpredictable system, and that was part of the fun too. In fact, what drove us from the beginning when we all started working on this mission was mainly that: fun. What a ride!
