NASA Competition trip to Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio

NASA. Cleveland, Ohio. May 24th-May 28th.

We were 1 of 4 teams from around the US chosen to send our project into the stratosphere. We had a full schedule. We toured the Bio-medical lab, Ballistics Lab (Kelly's favorite), Space Craft Propulsion Lab, Space Power Lab, and Virtual Reality Lab (Brock's favorite and yes, virtual reality does exist. Very Cool!) to name a few. We had wonderful speakers, the teams presentations, our awesome launch day and delicious food. Yum!

Team Daedalus: Ben Burge, Sam Burge, Nathan Fox, Brock Grimshaw

Cleveland is the home of the Rock-n-Roll Hall of Fame. This guitar was in the lobby of the 4 star Marriott that NASA provided for us.

Team Daedalus: Ben, Nathan, Jon (the advisor) Brock, Sam and their project payload. This was a great team. They were all friends before they got together to submit their project.

LOL! The boys biggest concern of the boys was, "Where can we buy flight suits?" Yes, they did get the flight suits.

The day of the balloon and payload launch. Nathan, Ben, Brock, advisor Jon and Sam. All the NASA people asked a lot of questions. They were amazed at the boys design and the use of carbon fiber, a light weight, 10 times stronger than steel material.

The "payload."

Brock is tying the payload to the set of strings that will hoist all the other payloads into the stratosphere.

Our payload going up, up and away.

The NASA guys attached a camera to their payload to take pictures every 30 seconds during flight. This is the balloon and payloads going up into the stratosphere.

The balloon popped at 106 thousand feet and the payloads fell to the ground. This is a picture on the way down. You can see the land and fields below. Cool!

The payload recovery. We found them in a farmers field. All the payloads were intact.

We toured the Bio-medical Lab. This is a flight simulator that tests a pilots reaction time, paying attention and how the brain works under a complex task. (like video gaming-lol)

Brock at the controls.