The dream of reaching near space
Story from 1990s:
Around the 1990s, my parents moved to a rented house in the center of our home town Rajapalayam. Thats when I first met our landlord Mr.Rajalingam Raja who was a retired businessman. He closed his grocery store business and started doing small finance for the rest of his life. While, I am introducing him as my landlord, he has never been like one. He has always been a best friend, mentor and a God father to me, despite being 50 yrs elder than me.
Mr. Rajalingam Raja:
Despite his limited education qualification and exposure, he had a deep passion towards electronics. He understood electrical and electronics very well just from his passion towards technology. This was a skill that he gained by constant learning despite his age. For the first time in my life, I came across someone who had a hobby which was not related to their profession.
While, he is not alive this day to share my current hobbies and see the advancements, I always consider him a God father close to heart because of whom I am what I am today.
If I had not met him back then, I can't imagine what I would be today. I would definitely not have got the interest towards electronics which eventually transformed into a passion for software programming.
Team 2.25:
My Godfather had a very close friend with whom he shared his dreams and hobbies. Mr. Subbiah Raja is another great person who had deep passion towards photography and technology.
Together they were dreaming about flying a balloon filled with light weight gases and attach a small blinking light to prank their friends about a UFO. This was a top secret project which was never revealed to anyone other than we 3 as far as I know. They were dreaming about connecting a small light bulb to a battery and make it blink at a certain frequency. They would often brainstorm about this idea and had an unsolved challenge of producing the lightweight gases. The number 2 in the title comes from these 2 gentlemen with great ambitions and the 0.25 comes from a 5th grader who joined their dream club.
Unfortunately they never achieved this dream but they embedded the idea in to my head so deep that even after 3 decades the idea keeps floating in my head. I remember every conversation they had about this idea and the dreams I had after each discussion.
Attempt #1 (2008-09):
In 2008, I decided to actually try this out in a more modern way, when I came across a video online about another near space experiment. However, after a long gap in electronics, I couldn't complete that dream and gave up after burning the GPS and RF chips which were imported from UK. The year 2008 ended up bit tough at work and had to put a big pause to this dream again.
Attempt #2 (2020-21):
After more than a decade, and more recent involvement electronics hobbies with Raspberry Pi, I decided to resume this dream again. This time, I had more ideas and lot of prev experiments to follow. Decided to add a lot of new ideas on to the original dream and made more scientific goals to it then just pranking someone. I started building a Near space satellite project with electronic components commercially available for any electronic enthusiast today.
RaLiSat-1:
Decided to name it after my Godfather, in his memories. I continue with my dream this time with more knowledge and focus. It took me a year (on and off, mostly during weekends) to fully assemble, test and launch the satellite. Here is a series of blogposts from the past related to RaLiSat-1.
Test scenarios include putting it into a freezer to test sub-zero temperatures. Of course, even with max settings my parents refrigerator could only get to -12°C, while the worst case in real-world near space can ready -60°C. I definitely under estimated this to be close to -45°C but it seems to have reached -63°C even at 14 kms altitude.
And the dashboard looked like this while the communication was lost with the payload.
Why did I try this?
While this is a popular hobby among electronics and near space enthusiasts in some part of the world, it is not a common thing in India. The one reason why I did attempt this, was that
The idea was running in my head for almost 3 decades and I would definitely have become crazy at some point if I didn't try.
Now, I am unable to tell exactly what will come next. Stay tuned.