Steady Progress!

This time in 2013 I was just connecting with Copenhagen Suborbitals and working at full speed to prepare to test an early draft of my pressure suit; this time in 2014 I was contracting with SpaceX on pressure garmennts, visiting their mind-melting Hawthorne, California facilities. This time in 2015 I was rushing to prepare a pressure garment for demonstration at TEDx Portland. The project has come a long way and progress and events have been rapid-fire, so much so that I often am unable to appreciate these unique experiences. Somehow I would love to sit down and think about them -- but there's no time, which is OK at the moment. This year I'm completing my flight instruction and will start flying the Mark VI pressure suit to high altitudes, this suit being a distillation of all I have learned since the project began in 2008!

I'm also preparing for a visit to India, where I will talk on the reinvention of human space exploration technologies and visit the Indian Space Research Organization, a visit to the Google SciFoo event, a free-corm collaboration that I've been invited to attend, and the Oregon Institute of Technology's Tech Talk, in May -- all of that after next week's demonstration of our balloon equipment at the Pearson Air Museum! Some day I'll come up for a breath :)

Photo: Incredible week with Copenhagen Suborbitals, Denmark 2013. L to R, John Haslett, Peter Madsen, Kristian von Bengtson and me.

Photo: Rocket production floor at SpaceX, in Hawthorne, California:

Photo: At TEDx Brussels, December 2014 (which was followed by a talk at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics).

Immersion Test!

Divers strapping me into a weighted seat in my brother's swimming pool to look for small leaks from my pressure suit, which would show up as bubbles streaming from the leak point. Note, no bubbles streaming from my home-built space suit = we had in this test a perfect performance of the garment!

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.