HIGHLANDER OF THE ISSUE
REACHING NEW HEIGHTS Senior Luke Valencic sends high altitude balloon into near-space NOAH BARNES A&E EDITOR
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large white balloon drifts through the sky like a birthday party gone terribly wrong. This isn’t just a stray balloon from Party City—there is much more hidden beneath this white latex blimp drifting up through the clouds. Senior Luke Valencic chose to work on a passion project this summer that reached monumental heights. His love for rockets inspired him to design, build and launch a high altitude balloon that reached an elevation close to 90,000 feet and captured stunning photographs of near space. “It was probably the start of last summer, or even into the end of junior year, I was building a bunch of model rockets,” Valencic said. “I found it super fascinating the way these things work and the amazing things you can do with not that much money.” Making a weather balloon is much more complicated than blowing up a balloon and sending it off into the sky. The process is long and arduous, requiring advanced design skills, time and money. The first step in the process is to design the balloon. Then one must acquire the necessary materials to actually build it. “I started first by researching what these things are and how they work,” Valencic said. “I found that the general system that these weather balloons revolve around is that a balloon will bring a payload up and the balloon will expand as the atmosphere thins because the helium wants to get out of the balloon. The balloon expands so much 12 | FEATURES | OCTOBER 2021
that it eventually pops, and the whole package comes falling down.” As one can imagine, a large package falling down from 90,000 feet can pose a danger. To keep the project safe and within the guidelines of the Federal Aviation Administration, Valencic designed a parachute to attach to the payload. “I didn’t want to cause a threat to anyone or hurt anyone, so that was of big concern to me,” Valencic said. “Between the package and the balloon you [need] a parachute. The parachute will engage once the atmosphere thickens a little bit, and that will bring your package down to where you want it.” The hardest part about making the weather balloon wasn’t designing the balloon, building it or even finding it. It was dealing with the legal process that posed the greatest obstacle. “I found out that I needed to make my package fit a couple of guidelines. It has to be under four pounds, the string has to be breakable by 50 pounds of force and there has to be a parachute,” Valencic said. Motivation was hard to sustain throughout the project, and just as any great mind experiences, there were some slumps. Valencic grappled with the thought of losing all his hard work to the uncontrollable variables that the balloon would encounter on its journey. “At the end of the day, I was sending a package into the atmosphere tethered to a balloon,” Valencic said. “The GPS could land upside down, and I could never find it. It could hit a tree Photos courtesy of Luke Valencic | Page design by Taylor Olson
