Normalizing the narrative, creating industry wide standards and practices within the ballooning community

摘要

Stratospheric ballooning has long been dominated by flights of large payloads and/or flights sponsored by various national program driven flight opportunities. There have been many significant advances made by each of these national programs, each tending to be unique. These stove piped advances have in many cases also addressed challenges that are common to all stratospheric balloon flights. Common elements such as power, power storage, thermal control, communication, data storage, and safety related systems offer up an epistemology sharing that we seek to normalize. This paper will help define some potential common elements and processes for consideration toward implementing a standardization for ballooning. This standardization may have great impact in some areas and minimal impact in others. This paper will set out a potential framework and path forward from which to start. It is hoped that this paper will open the dialog toward improving the future of ballooning. As well, this paper will address intellectual property protection, conflict of interest concerns, and where applicable address the boundaries of sharable and open-sourced products. Standards can be found throughout many industries such as the IEEE standard overseeing telecommunications, transportation, biomedical, to name a few or the ever-popular MIL-STD or MIL-SPEC instituted by the U.S. Department of Defense. This could become an AIAA Ballooning Standard, for example.