Here's What Happened (2)

The Story

Part 2: Recovery

Due to the fact that we had no cell coverage in the launch zone, we had to go find a Wi-Fi hotspot and run a final flight prediction. The original intention was to run a prediction from the launch zone, tethering our phones to a laptop to give it internet connection. With this small change of plans, we packed our gear into the truck and drove north to Prosser, where there would surely be a McDonald's with Wi-Fi and some breakfast. As we drove, we prayed for a quick and easy recovery. I could not have imagined the ordeal we were about to experience. At the McDonald's in Prosser, we got something to eat and loaded up our computers. It was when we tried to run a flight prediction that I remembered one fatal point: flight predictions only work in the future. The time was already 9:00 AM, over an hour since launch, and the flight prediction would be totally inaccurate. We decided to base our landing zone off of a prediction I ran the night before, giving us a general area to search. The prediction I ran also gave us a flight time of 2 hours 17 minutes, so we had to get going in order to view the landing. We left the McDonald's and drove southeast down Highway 221. At this point we sent our first "ping" to the cell phone on board the capsule, making a GPS location request. As we went, I periodically checked the other cell phones to see if they had coverage. Things were not looking good as we drew closer to the landing zone, coverage was jumping between no service and 2 or 3 bars of 3G service. We arrived on location around 9:50 AM, driving up and down 221 to find a location with decent coverage. After finding a spot, we sat on top of the truck and scanned the skies, sending "pings" to the capsule cell phone every so often, and waited for a response. The predicted landing time came and went, and no response was received. We waited another ten minutes or so, but neither sight nor signal came. We assumed that the capsule had landed in a location without service, and we would need to find it manually. Back on 221, we selected side roads almost at random and drove down them for a while, before turning back and selecting another. After about twenty minutes, the impossibility of our task began to dawn on us. We were surrounded by hundreds of giant, circular farms, and the capsule could be in any one of them. This was no "needle in a haystack". It was "small red parachute in thousands of acres of farmland", "needle in a haystack on steroids". We drove for what seemed like hours, really just one hour, endlessly looking out the window. "Was that it?", "No, just a plastic bag". Spirits plunged to an all-time low. We found ourselves driving West on an undeveloped gravel road. The road turned South, back towards the Columbia, towards home. One last stretch of road before giving the balloon up for lost. I began to try and come to terms with the fact that we would never see the capsule again. The car was silent as we drove South down Alderdale Road towards the Columbia River. I could not have expected what came next. At exactly 11:58 AM, the silence was harshly broken by a sound from one of the cell phones. It was a text message. I quickly reached for the phone and read the message. Sure enough, it was a message from the capsule, containing GPS coordinates. Another phone received a message from the capsule while I looked at the first. The car was bustling with excitement as message after message came in, responses to every individual "ping" we sent the capsule. We pulled off on a side road and loaded the GPS coordinates into our devices. When we saw the location of the capsule, we became quite confused. In straight lines, the capsule was 73 miles East of the launch location, and 45 miles East from the predicted landing location. By road, the capsule was 72.5 miles away from where we stopped the truck. In an instant, we went from a hopeless search to knowing the exact location of the capsule, accurate to 5 meters. We drove East to the coordinates given, and tried to make sense of what happened. The balloon's flight had lasted 4 hours. But if we had put more helium than we planned, the balloons flight should have been shorter, not longer. As it turns out, even though we put in more helium, we had not planned for enough positive lift to give it a fast enough ascension rate. The various resources we consulted had different recommendations for positive lift. One recommended 1.5 times the weight of the capsule for lift in helium. Another recommended 3 or 4 pounds of positive lift. We gave the balloon 600 grams, as recommended by a third resource. This was clearly not enough, giving us only half the ascension rate we desired. We drove on, crossing the Columbia at Umatilla, and followed the river East and then North, before turning inland around Burbank. The terrain in this area was not looking good, the capsule could have landed in a stockyard, a small pond, or the tightly packed, inaccessible corn fields. We drove up a small hill, following the GPS coordinates, and found two farmhouses. We knocked on both doors to ask permission to search the fields, but no one was home. We drove down a road bordering the huge circular fields, and there it was. Lying in the dirt and weeds between two circle fields, the capsule was clearly visible and only a hundred or so feet from the road. The recovery may not have been quick, but it was definitely easy. We quickly brought the capsule and parachute back and began the long drive home. In total, we had driven 648 miles.