Getting involved

Whether it is a detrimental thing or not I'm getting involved in two more clubs at my school.

• Mars Reach
• Society of Manufacturing Engineers

The mars reach club does high altitude balloons, rocketry, and a few other things. SME may let me do some community service with some of the engineering knowledge i'm learning at some local schools. Which actually sounds cool to me. I always loved teaching children at OMSI, and cybercamps.

I've been researching high altitude balloons for taking atmospheric pictures like the one below(100,000 feet.) I am very excited about it. I am timid to commit too much time though as I have plenty of schoolwork and other projects going on at the same time. I just made a personal decision not to let good opportunities pass me by. "Reach for the stars" so to speak.



Image from http://www.natrium42.com/halo/flight2/#hardware

Here is some of the fruits of my research:

1. http://vpizza.org/~jmeehan/balloon/
2. http://www.universetoday.com/2006/01/20/satellites-on-a-budget-high-altitude-balloons/
3. http://hackaday.com/2009/09/19/high-altitude-balloons/
4. http://www.natrium42.com/halo/flight2/#hardware
   
5. http://www.arhab.org/

On a seperate topic - i stumbled into this engineered nerf gun esque thing. http://boltsniper.com/BS-5/BS5.htm pretty slick. He calls it a FAST-ACTION RIFLE(FAR).

So for now I'm just going to try and stay on top of things, as they just keep piling up, and i keep knocking em down at about the same rate. Kind of a good and bad thing. *shrug* at least it's progress. Onward!