Balloon System Inspection

Back in beautiful Oregon after driving a balloon system I purchased all the way East in Flint, Michigan. The system has good maintenance logs and is in fine shape with only 62 flight hours on the basket, burners and fuel tanks etc. Very exciting to unload and assemble the system with fellow Pacific Spaceflight members -- we will be displaying our pressure suits and balloon gear at the annual Yuri's Night Space Party on 12 April at the Pearson Air Museum! A lot of fun and excitement in the works!

Intelligent Life Billions of Years Older than Humanity

Fascinating!

"...Earth-like planets that orbit in a continuously habitable zone are essentially found only around [metal-rich G-type stars which first formed about 10 billion years ago]...Assuming that the development time for human-type intelligence is about 4.6 billion years (as on Earth), then the first intelligent societies could have appeared about 5 billion years ago. We thus have to face the possibility that there are intelligent societies billions of years older than ours."

-- p. 207 of Ulmschneider, P. 2003. 'Intelligent Life in the Universe'. Springer Physics and Astronomy, Berlin.

Mess!

Sometimes it gets messy, but that's the way it goes. Late night work at home, refurbishing an older pressure suit model.

Instrument Assembly

Assembling the various indicators and actuators needed for high, experimental flying this Summer! Among others, altimeters, compass, oxygen flow regulator, vacuum gauge and so on. Soon, picking up a balloon basket from Michigan!

Field Project 2016

Finalizing plans for this summer's wetland and high desert landscape archaeology project, I am looking forward to being in the field again! Also this summer -- lots of flying, balloons and my paraglider! One season to go and then it'll be a very outdoorsy summer! Details about the project in a PDF file at my academia.edu page. Low-res flier below.