With pleasure
There are 3 members in our team, 2 from Kiev and one from Odessa.
We met at last years NASA space apps challenge in Kiev with my mate Oleg and decided to work together on Cosmos.Agency (space tourism info website). But we really wanted to make something offline and started researching what is it possible to do in Ukraine with our own money.
First we wanted to launch a cubesat. I went to Ukrainian state space agency and talked to the management, asked about Ukrainian rockets and launches, but this year's budget doesn't allow any space programs here sadly
At least we found guys from Polytechnic university with own lab. They had already created 3 cubesats and successfully launched those beauties into space.
Anyway it takes long years to do it, test it (also very expensive), and to boost our optimism we decided to fly a balloon. There are lots of space-related events here in Kiev and one of them was about amateur rocketry, there I met a guy who introduced me to the third member of our team — Alex. Alex has few stratosphere balloon launches behind and he agreed to join us. So we have big plans now!
What about you?