The Secunda Amateur Radio Club (ZS6SRC) launched the BACAR 5 high altitude balloon on Saturday 21 October.  BACAR is the acronymn for BAlloon Carrying Amateur Radio.

The BACAR project is a STEM (Science/Technology/Engineering/Mathematics) educational initiative, being run by the Secunda Amateur Radio Club.  This is the fifth year of the project.  Schools are taking part by assembling experiments which fly on the the balloon mission. After a succesfull recovery of the various payloads attached to the balloon, experiment results can be downloaded and processed.

The primary mission objective was surely achieved: giving learners an opportunity to take part in a STEM project, maybe planting the seeds for choosing a career in science or engineering!

Some highlights on launch day:

Preparations for launch under way

Members of the AMSAt SA Kletskous cubesat development team

We have liftoff!

Some amazing views of Earth on the way up

At an altitude of 29.5 km the balloon burst.

 Some more awesome views coming down:

After a few minutes the payloads were on solid ground and waiting to be recovered.

Watch one of the videos recorded during the flight:

https://youtu.be/WxO8wzyVtLs

And some flight statistics: