By now you've probably heard about Project Loon from Google, released on Friday:
http://www.google.com/loon http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2013/06/introducing-project-loon.html http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10890750
This is an extremely exciting development, and could potentially be an enormous opportunity for science in general, and possibly for us!: there clearly is a huge amount of astrophysics, atmospheric physics, and earth science that can be done if and when Earth is covered with a network of stratospheric balloons.
Contacts with Google and Project Loon most definitely do need to be established. (Max has a cousin who worked on it for a summer -- that's a start. More contacts very welcome!!!) Formal contacts might best be done at the space agency level, and we should work on that possibility. But in the meantime, any informal contacts that we can make (e.g. via friends, relatives, acquaintances working at Google and/or on this project) would be very welcome! If and when there is an opportunity for small science payloads on the Project Loon balloons, we clearly want to be there.
cheers, thanks! justin