By: Abby Kass ’27
It’s a bird… it’s a plane… it’s a high-altitude balloon! On Tuesday, May 12th, TLS Space Program accomplished a huge goal of theirs: they launched a high-altitude balloon. The team worked tirelessly for more than a year to meet this goal, and TLS community couldn’t be prouder.
The faculty member who leads the team, Raz Idan, said the idea for the balloon began all the way back in December 2024.
“We were hoping to launch within six months, and quickly realized that we have a lot of work,” Idan said. “So it took us more than that half of a year to finish, and we said we’ll launch early of the beginning of the school year, September. Then that’s when we [were] met with some issues.”
Idan describes the issues including anything from aviation regulations, software problems, or even just the weather. In fact, Idan said, “we’ve been trying to launch, actively trying to launch, since about January of this year… it was about four months of playing catch up with weather.”
Once the team saw that last Tuesday was going to be a perfect launch day, they scrambled to get ready. Junior Ari Messinger, a student on the team, even mentioned that “there were things that weren’t completely finished on launch day, but it was the best opportunity we were going to get, so we had to go with it.”
But, despite the challenges, the team was able to launch! The balloon, filled with large amounts of helium, carried cameras, data-tracking sensors, and even artwork that members of the TLS community had made (who will get their artwork back after it has been to the edge of space). The balloon soared to a whopping 90,779 feet, just short of the team’s 100,000-foot goal, and reached atmospheric temperatures of -43℃. Sophomore Jack Epstein, a student on the team, adds that the balloon was also able to travel a large amount of distance. “We got a pretty good distance too; I think it was around 66.8 miles,” he mentions.
Even with challenges persisting throughout the duration of it, the launch was incredibly successful! The team was able to collect a great amount of data.
Messinger pointed out that it isn’t just the data collected or numbers achieved that matter. “The biggest success of the class was that we all worked as a team. We had a bunch of problems that arose throughout various points in the mission, and we all worked together to solve them.”
Epstein mentions another uplifting aspect of the launch: “This school that we went to, Hudson Senior High School in Hudson, New York, the students were actively watching us, which is pretty cool to see that other people were taking interest in our launch.”
As the faculty member who oversees the team, Idan had to know when and when not to get involved. “I try to balance letting the students work on their own, but at the same time, there are some things that they don’t always know and that I learned as well… I feel like I led this project, but it was a team effort on their behalf.”
Compared to Idan’s, Messinger’s role on the project looked very different as a student. “My role in the team was mainly electronics, and some firmware, and some software development,” he mentions. He gives an example: “I designed the printed circuit board for the main circuit for the payload.”
Going forward, Idan and the team will be working towards hopefully more balloon launches where they’ll be able to collect other types of data. They are also still working towards the ultimate goal of sending a satellite to space. But, more imminently, “the data we collected will be used by the science department teachers,” Idan said. “They can actually do analysis on the data. They can figure out what kind of analysis, what is the question they want to answer, but they now have the raw data.”
Looking ahead to next year, Epstein discusses “We’re looking to launch another high-altitude balloon, [and] hopefully add some new features to it. We want to make it smaller and maybe go a little farther. Overall, we’re very happy with how the launch turned out, and I’m proud of everyone who worked on our team.”
Epstein rounds it out by saying “hopefully we can get new students participating, and hear their ideas, and get their help on creating the next high-altitude balloon.”
The team didn’t fail to incorporate the Jewish values that TLS is built on into their reflection of the launch.
In an update by Messinger for the program’s website, he writes, “Both throughout the 18 months of building and during launch, the team’s hard work and refusal to give up model a powerful example of resilience rooted in Jewish history.”
In an article by Dr. Danny Aviv, director of E2, titled What Jewish Education Looks Like from 90,000 Feet, written for The Times of Israel, he elaborates on this point. He writes, “There is something deeply Jewish about teaching students that meaningful work often involves setbacks, delays, uncertainty, and repeated attempts, and that we are still obligated to continue the work anyway. Our students lived that in a single day. They watched their models work, watched parts of the mission fail unexpectedly, tracked one transmitter drifting toward the ocean, recovered a payload across state lines, and then immediately began discussing what they would improve for the next launch. The balloon transmitting “Am Yisrael Chai” from near the edge of space was not just a radio message. It reflected that same idea.”
