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 project 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 can begin immediately and end on November 28, 2011. New for this year: teams will keep design documentations to be reviewed by the contest judges. Winning designs will be made available to a few lucky K-12 students in order to help discover that space is within their reach. At the end of competition teams will submit their results and pictures to 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:
Rudy Ristich, event organizer
Jay Margalus, event organizer