TRL 5 to 7 Without Waiting for a Rocket — Jason Krueger
A thermal vac chamber can't test your radio, and a radio test can't change the temperature. Jason Krueger explains what a near-space flight test gives an engineering team that no chamber can, and why TRL 5 to 7 is where StratoStar lifts.
Show notes
Quest to Space is a show about how engineers and scientists actually get hardware to space: the decisions, the constraints, and the setbacks along the way. Season 1 is a three-episode introduction to StratoStar Systems founder Jason Krueger, hosted by Macy Bussberg. From Season 2, Jason hosts and interviews the engineers and scientists doing the work.
In this episode, Jason explains what near-space flight testing actually gives a commercial engineering team: a full integration test of hardware, software, and a team's ability to deliver on a date. He walks through Technology Readiness Level one through nine, why 5 to 7 is StratoStar's sweet spot, and what customers have learned from a flight that they could not have bought any other way.
What's covered
- Where near space actually is: roughly 60,000 to 120,000 ft, the band the industry calls the ignorosphere, where rockets pass straight through, planes cannot reach, and satellites orbit far above
- Why a balloon rather than a wind tunnel or a vacuum chamber. A thermal vac cannot test a radio, and a radio test cannot change the temperature; at the edge of space every test runs at once
- Where "Wingman Engineers" came from, and the 2006 business plan that started out trying to beam internet to remote parts of Africa
- Fixed price by weight and complexity instead of time and materials: "less paperwork, more flying"
- What a first call covers: weight first, then physical volume in CubeSat units, then data and power
- FQS and IFS compared: a two-and-a-half-hour latex flight under 6 lb, against a zero-pressure platform up to 80 lb with a live two-way Starlink feed that lets engineers change settings mid-flight
- Technology Readiness Level 1 through 9 explained plainly, and why 5 to 7 is where StratoStar lifts
- What customers found out: 300-plus-mile LoRaWAN transmissions, imaging sensors proven at 61,000 ft, and battery chemistries charged and discharged below -50 °C
- Why hardware does not need to be space qualified to fly on a balloon
About near-space
StratoStar flies payloads to roughly 60,000 to 100,000 ft, what Jason calls "about 99% space." Hardware experiences radiation, thermal extremes, and near-vacuum, then comes back to the customer along with the flight data. More than 99% recovery rate.
Guest: Jason Krueger, President and Founder, StratoStar Systems LLC, Indianapolis, Indiana.
Host: Macy Bussberg, Executive Assistant, StratoStar Systems.
Next episode: the StratoStar story archive. The missions, the strange things that come back from the stratosphere, the Discovery Channel partnership that ended with more than 22 million views, and what 20 years of this work has actually taught Jason.
If you've got a payload, a project, or a question you've been kicking around, start a conversation at stratostar.com.
Guest
Jason Krueger
President and Founder · StratoStar Systems LLC
Jason Krueger is the founder of StratoStar Systems, a near-space platform provider based in Indianapolis. He started flying hardware to the edge of space as a business student at Taylor University in 2002, and has since built StratoStar into a flight-test operation with more than 1,000 missions flown for customers including NASA and Northrop Grumman. In 2011 he was brought into NASA Kennedy's Rocket University program to train shuttle engineers on rapid prototyping and near-space flight test.
