Off we go into the wild blue yonder, climbing high into the sun …

No, this wasn’t the first verse of the Air Force Song heard loud and proud at Falcon Stadium, but a successful weather balloon launch carrying the superintendent’s flight cap more than 20 miles above the sea. And, yes, cheers echoed around the Air Force Academy campus.

The freshmen prank — also known as a spirit mission — was aimed at boosting morale among cadets.

“Other cadets were saying this was one of the coolest things they’ve ever seen for a spirit mission,” said freshman Matthew Sharkey, an aerospace engineering major from Shrewsbury, Pa., who handled photo and video responsibilities.

Fellow freshman John Arne, an aeronautical engineering major from Lincolnshire, Ill., said videos and photos of the launch were a hit with alumni on social media.

“Reading the comments on some of the Instagram and Facebook posts, grads were commenting, ‘This is what we expect from some of the most brilliant cadets.’ So, it is cool to set a bar for future spirit missions,” Arne said.

The academy — which produces officers for the Air and Space Forces — is known for its quality academic and military training. The rigor is often more than enough to keep the roughly 4,000 cadets busy. But some choose to participate in extracurricular activities.

Air Force Academy flying team prepares for national competition

Shepherd Kruse, a junior astronautical engineering major from Colorado Springs, started Blue Horizon, the academy’s cadet-run experimental rocketry club, when he was a freshman. With more than 30 active participants, the club has both a competition team and a hybrid team that builds rockets.

“The whole purpose behind Blue Horizon was to take some of the most talented cadets … put them in one room and take the talents they have … and build some really cool projects and do some really cool stuff,” Kruse said.

The scientific reason behind launching a weather balloon earlier this month was to test a cheaper and lighter GPS tracking system that was designed by cadets.

The fun reason was because “we are all trying to launch stuff as high as we can … and it builds inspiration,” Kruse said.

The balloon peaked at 108,000 feet, which is 28,000 feet higher than any of Kruse’s six launches during high school.

The 6 ½-foot wide balloon climbed more than 800 feet per minute for two hours, expanding to roughly 30 feet while ascending into the stratosphere. Video shows Superintendent Lt. Gen. Richard Clark’s flight cap, adorned with three glistening stars, in front of a glowing bright blue line clearly marking the curvature of the Earth with a deep black sky above.

“As the balloon rises, the gas inside the balloon expands because the atmospheric pressure surrounding the balloon drops,” according to NASA. “The atmosphere is 100 to 200 times less dense at the float altitudes than on the ground.”

The payload — in the shape of an equilateral pyramid, consisting of Clark’s cap, a GPS tracker and multiple GoPro cameras recording both video and stills — was tethered directly under the parachute, which was tied below the balloon.

Students from last year’s freshman class had designed and built a device for this same project but weren’t able to launch it because they didn’t have enough helium. So, the launch waited for participants from the Class of 2025, who redesigned the payload.

“We worked with a triangular-base carbon fiber rods and 3D printed joints so it fit really nice and snug, said freshman Gunnar Gott, an electrical and computer engineering major from San Diego. “We added brackets for the cameras to make sure we got good photos and videos.”

One camera shot stills every 10 seconds while another recorded video of the superintendent’s hat. Another looked up at the balloon while the last one looked straight down.

The cadets, who represent several different majors and squadrons, made sure to attach multiple squadron patches for the flight.

Simon Gott, Gunnar Gott’s younger brother with the same major and hometown, said the group learned a lot.

“We figured out that an equilateral pyramid wasn’t as we initially assumed with all the angles being 60-degree,” he said. “We made some stupid mistakes but it was fun learning. We came together on this and knocked it out quick.”

Cadets launched the balloon — which are often used by meteorologists to help with weather forecasting — at 7 a.m. March 3 before heading to classes.

Arne said it was cool to sit in class and track the balloon’s movements live, thanks to fellow freshmen Ethan Lefebvre and Junhyung Park, who worked on the electronics architecture.

Lefebvre, a computer science major from Uxbridge, Mass., built a website prototype with a script that pulls flight data and presents it in a user-friendly way.

“Knowing that people were counting on me helped me learn so much faster,” Lefebvre said.

Park, an electrical and computer engineering major from Montgomery, Ala., was praised by fellow cadets for his additions to the team.

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“Considering how expensive it is to use the actual research sensors that are used on normal weather balloon launches, in order to make that cheaper and a lot lighter, we are using a feather board that has data transmission capability with a LoRaWAN, a technology that used low power consumption but has a wide range of data transmission.

“It feeds the GPS sensor and the temperature sensor and sends the live data of latitude, longitude, as well as temperature to the user. Ethan and I developed an application that displays that data in a user-friendly way.

“Ethan and I had a lot of failures while developing the electronics architecture. This is not the kind of experience that you can gain from the classroom. It can only be done if you have the desire to do so and the motivation to reach a certain goal. I thought the process of going through failure was valuable.”

Once the balloon popped, it only took about 20 minutes before it hit the ground.

“It was much faster than you would have hoped,” Kruse said.

“The atmosphere is so thin up there that the parachute didn’t catch the air. Peak speeds were over 400 mph, so close to the speed of a jet airliner. As it descended to Earth, the air got thicker and that’s when it slowed down to about 25 mph by the time it hit the ground.”

He said it averaged around 60 mph throughout much of the descent.

Kruse explained that the cap was pulled over pieces of cardboard that were shaped in a way to act as a fishing hook, ensuring the base commander’s hat wouldn’t go missing.

After classes ended and the sun began setting, four cadets loaded up in a vehicle and headed more than 70 miles southeast toward into Crowley County to retrieve the payload.

“When we were driving out there we were like, ‘Man, are we just going to come upon an absolute mangled mess of everything we made or is it going to be intact?’” Gunnar Gott said.

The group hiked 8 miles through the cactus-ridden landscape into the night before locating the payload with their flashlights.

The cap and everything else were there. The exterior frame was undamaged.

“This is what we were hoping to achieve and we were able to exceed our expectations,” Gunnar Gott said.

Club mentor Maj. David Hensley, an instructor in the electrical and computer engineering department, is impressed with the dedication the cadets have shown.

“They aren’t just street smart; they are book smart,” Hensley said. “They are keeping up on their academics and their military training and all their other obligations.

“I really enjoy seeing the learning that takes place within the cadets. They are all really sharp.”

Air Force Academy flying team prepares for national competition