EOSS Flight History

Flights 1 through 100

Here is the recap of EOSS flights from EOSS-1 in November of 1990 through EOSS-100 in November of 2005.

If you can fill in some of the holes in this data with information stored in your records, please send it along. I'd love to get some hard data, most notably:

1. EOSS-028, practically no info available. Only the launch site and a fairly confident date is known.
2. EOSS-031, no landing info

Map of Touchdowns

EOSS-001 through EOSS-100
Red Circles are Touchdowns

The three most eastern landings (Kansas and Iowa) are flights from various Great Plains Super Launches and do not originate in Colorado.

Here is the MapPoint map file for those of you who can use it and are interested. All data as shown for the landing of EOSS-006 is associated with each symbol.

• eoss_landings_1_to_100.ptm

Map of Launch Sites

These flights were launched from a variety of locations. In recent years we have adhered to  just two or three sites for all our launches. But in the early years, we would launch from just about anywhere. Here is a map of our launch sites:

EOSS-001 through EOSS-100
Red Triangles are Launch Points

Below is the MapPoint file for those of you who can use it and are interested. All data for each flight as shown for the launch site of EOSS-092 is associated with each symbol. When you first click on the symbol over Deer Trail, MapPoint will give you a choice of many flights launched from that location. There are actually multiple symbols on the map for many launch sites. However, unlike the landing location symbols, the only unique data for each of the launch site pushpins is the flight number. Click on any one of them and you get the same data with the exception of the flight name.

• eoss_launches_1_to_100.ptm

Summary Data for Flights 1 through 100

I've posted a subset of the data available in the spread sheet linked below.

Table of EOSS Flights

The table doesn't cover all of the information available in the spread sheet but may satisfy some of your curiosities.

Here is the Excel spread sheet which contains summary information about each flight.

• eoss_Cumulative_1_to_100.xls (1.2 Megs)

note: The Excel spread sheet above uses VBA macros to calculate the range and bearing values. This greatly reduces the size of the file but it will mean that you will have to enable macros if you wish to see these calculated values. The straight ASCII file below has no macros. So, if you are adverse, there below is your answer.

Here is a plain ASCII delimited file that should import into any spread sheet program. It contains only the data below and no charts, or pivot tables that are available within the Excel file above.

• eoss_Cumulative_1_to_100.csv (28 KB)

The fields for each flight are:

• Flight Number
• Date of Flight
• Launch Site Name
• Flight Times (UTC)
  • Launch
  • Float
  • Burst
  • Touchdown
• Flight Elapsed Times
  • Ascent Time (minutes)
  • Float Time (minutes)
  • Descent Time (minutes)
  • Flight Duration (minutes)
• Maximum Altitude
• Average Ascent Rate
• Maximum Ascent Rate
• Final Descent Rate (just before touchdown)
• Maximum Descent Rate
• Maximum Speed
• Launch Site Latitude and Longitude
• Landing Site Latitude and Longitude
• Bearing from Launch Site
• Range from Launch Site
• Predicted Touchdown Latitude and Longitude
• Bearing from the Actual Touchdown to the Predicted
• Distance from the Actual Touchdown to the Predicted
• Balloon Size (if relatively small grams, if really big cu. ft.)
• Payload weight
• Free Lift in pounds
• Free Lift as a percent
• Parachute size
• Number of Payloads aboard flight.
• Primary, Secondary and Tertiary customers
• Notes about flight concerning data or maybe just general info.
• Two extra fields (Year, Flights) that help develop a flights per year chart.

Data for all fields is NOT available for all flights. Prior to reliable APRS/GPS, we didn't keep too close track of much of this information, or it wasn't available at all. But, from 10 on it's fairly comprehensive and from 50 forward it is quite complete. Only failed GPS systems account for lack of data there.

Check the notes field within the spread sheet for notices of possible estimated data for any particular record.

And take note that for the first 20 flights maximum altitude was determined barometrically and is thus suspect as our sensor wasn't all that accurate over 75K feet.

Graphs

Only launch sites with 2 or more flights are graphed.

Two flights have been omitted from the above graph. EOSS-006 was in the air for 18 hours (1080 minutes). That was an accident. EOSS-023 was for the Air Force Academy and was an intentional floater which remained aloft for a total of almost 8 hours. I omitted them to increase readability of the remaining flights which all operated in under 250 minutes.

note: I'd like to thank Mike Manes, W5VSI, Merle McCaslin K0YUK and Marty Griffin WA0GEH for their submission of LOTS of information on early flights I seemed to have lost. And I'd also like to thank Nick Hanks N0LP for his help and great ideas on what data should be added to this spread sheet to make it more comprehensive.