A World-Class Educational Activity: The Eclipse Ballooning Project

Wouldn’t you like to help students participate in an exciting, engaging, real-world, hands-on, life-changing experience?

Well, here is just such an opportunity: the Eclipse Ballooning Project .  More than 1,000 middle school, high school, and university students, across the nation are designing, building, testing, and flying high altitude balloons that will live stream August’s total solar eclipse from near the edge of space.  Help us give the world an opportunity to come together as a community to participate in this spectacular event!

From Oregon to South Carolina these students will launch more than 70 high-altitude balloons on August 21, 2017 along the path of the first total solar eclipse to occur across the continental U.S. in over 38 years.  Project activities by students, mentors, faculty, and staff have far exceeded our resources to fund everyone.  So, we need your help, and that’s why this campaign has been organized.

They need your help to raise funds to travel on the launch sites on eclipse day, travel to give post-eclipse presentations, conduct extra practice launches, and to help replace parts or payloads lost during practice or broken though testing.

All donations are tax deductible as they are being made to the National Space Grant Foundation, a non-profit organization.

Providing real-world experiences for students is life changing, yet often funding constraints restrict a program’s ability to execute. Further, with one-quarter of the US population thinking the sun revolves around Earth (2014 NSF survey), we do not want to turn away anyone who has an interest in science and the ability to participate in this valuable and likely once-in-a-lifetime educational experience.

We have done an amazing amount of work to bring this project to this point with limited resources, but…

We need your help!

GoFundMe page at https://www.gofundme.com/eclipse2017