Autonomously returning a glider from space? - Week 1
Send the TA Sequoia (halfway) to space! Why not. A year or two ago I met a brilliant guy by the name of Kemal Ficici. He talked about how he really wanted to send a High Altitude Balloon up, similar to what David Windestal had done . I wanted to take part in it as well and offered to design the aircraft that would return the payload and.. well it kind of died there until about a week ago. The college I currently attend has an annual STEM fair and I learned about it a week or so back as well, so you can tell where this is going. What we initially wanted to do with the aircraft was that we would equip it with directional antennas and low frequency radios so we could essentially have strong radio connection even at 10km up, but that led to some problems. What if it suddenly got cloudy? What about the cost of the radio equipment? What about FPV and live video? Then we thought, why not just cut the pilot out of the equation? For my Computer Science final project I had lazily finishe