How it Works

With a high altitude weather balloon kit from StratoStar, your students can reach above 99% of our atmosphere and explore the near space environment first-hand using StratoStar's turnkey programs. Our turn key high-altitude weather balloons carry your STEM projects as high as 120,000 feet above the earth utilizing a StratoSAT research platform. What happens when you get there is completely up to your students.

As you and your students plan your encounter with the edge of space, the StratoStar team will work with you from inception to completion. We'll offer exciting project based learning examples and help you and your students ask questions, design your experiments, and take full advantage of your opportunity to learn first-hand about what lies above the atmosphere. This is more than a launch and chase to recover your experiments as it takes a journey across our planet. This is about problem solving and real science in the real world.

Learn:
Your students can't test their theories if they don't take time to formulate them. That's why the discovery process is the first step in every successful StratoStar experiment. What are you teaching? Whichever subject your students are learning, take time to dig deep and begin asking the kinds of questions about the effects of the near-space environment that can only be answered with a first-hand look.

Design & Build:
Once your students have their theories in mind, it's time to take a look at the sorts of instruments you'll need to find answers at the edge of space. Our systems are designed to be customized and are engineered from the ground up with your students needs in mind.  The students then start building their experiments in our payload boxes designed to survive the harsh environment of near space.  

Mission Planning:
The students' hypotheses are set, your system is prepared, and now it's time to get ready for your launch. Where will you let your high-altitude weather balloon go? How will you chase it? Who is going to recover it when it returns to Earth? It's up to you and your students to be mission control for your launch and plan it from start to finish.  

Launch:
Now for the best part! Work with your students to perform one last check of your systems, review your recovery plan, and send your balloon to the edge of space! Watch with your eyes and with your real-time wireless tracking system as the students' experiment floats up to heights of 120,000 feet above 99% of the atmosphere.

Tracking & Recovery:
Your students will track the platform's progress on the computer, while it is also recoding the data to your hard drive with StratoStar's real-time data link. The near space balloon will burst, and the experiments will glide gently to the ground on a parachute. The chase team tracks every movement of the platform from the chase vehicle, and arrives at the landing zone as the experiments touch down to Earth.

Analysis:
After the experiment touches down, your students can begin to export and analyze their videos, their pictures, and other data. As they sift through all the information collected on the flight, your students will slowly begin to find answers to their questions, and also new hypotheses to be tested on future edge of space flights.

Present:
The final step in the scientific process is what learning is all about: sharing knowledge. Once the students have properly processed all of their findings, they will have the opportunity to publish and present what they've learned to the greater community. Don't think of this as the end of the students' experiments, but the beginning of a lifetime of discovery in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math.