Hello All,

For those of you who are interested in flying rockoons (and/or instrumented, camera-carrying, or transponder/beacon-equipped balloons), Kaymont Consolidated--the U.S. Division of Totex Corporation in Japan--offers a line of Civilian/Enthusiast balloons, as well as their line of Government/Military meteorological sounding balloons (weather balloons: ceiling balloons, pilot balloons [pibals], and radiosonde balloons), see: https://www.kaymont.com/ and https://www.kaymont.com/balloons . They are often also available--for quite low prices--from long-time Ebay sellers, and:

The Indian firm Pawan also makes inexpensive but high-quality weather balloons (see: http://www.pawanexport.com/ ), and their balloons--along with Pawan-made plastic and Tyvek radiosonde parachutes (they lower the weather balloons' radiosondes--the meteorological instrument packages--gently to the ground), are also available cheaply on Ebay). *Here* (see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQJWe3I1ImA ) is a video of the August 21, 2017 total solar eclipse, taken at 100,000' by a GoPro OMNI camera lofted to the edge of space by a weather balloon! Also:

These weather balloons could also be used in rockoon (rocket + balloon) vehicles, enabling smaller, lower-impulse rockets to reach space; it has been done recently (see: https://www.google.com/search?q=mod...sclient=gws-wiz ^and^ https://www.google.com/search?rlz=1...0&bih=789&dpr=1 ). SpaceRyde, a Canadian company (see: https://www.spaceryde.com/ ), B2Space (see: https://b2-space.com/ ), a British firm, and a Spanish launch provider called Zero2Infinity (see: https://www.zero2infinity.space/ [they have already conducted flight tests]) are all developing orbital and/or suborbital rockoon launch vehicles which are wholly or partly reusable, further reducing their launch costs.

Model rocket or HPR rockoons would necessarily be suborbital, but they could reach space, especially if they were multi-stage. I hope this information will be useful.

__________________
Black Shire--Draft horse in human form, model rocketeer, occasional mystic, and writer, see:
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