Photo by Andrew Gerrand (Noisebridge)

Inspired by many recent amateur weather balloon endeavors across the U.S., Hackerspaces in Space aims to turn this phenomenon into a full- fledged competition. The First Annual Space Blimp Competition challenges international hackerspaces to send a weather balloon, with payload, into near-space to capture pictures of Earth’s horizon, to return the payload safely to the ground, and to retrieve the payload.

The launches will begin in earnest on June 1, 2010 and end on August 31, 2010. At the end of competition teams will post their results and pictures on the web where they will be judged on a variety of criteria like: retrieval time, weight of payload, and total cost of the project.

The competition is being coordinated by Workshop 88, Chicago’s only suburban hackerspace.

Project owners + coordinators:
Kevin Roof, teams organizer
Jay Margalus, event organizer
Allyson Wienc, marketing representative