Indeed, what’s in the sky this week? Spaceblimps, that’s what! Right here in D.C., there are very smart people sending things up into (near) space, as part of a competition that ended in late August with a launch in Camp Spring, Md. Hackerspaces in Space was created by a Chicago group to challenge teams anywhere and everywhere to “send a weather balloon, with payload, into near-space to capture pictures of the Earth’s horizon, to return the payload safely to the ground, and to retrieve the payload.” Local team HacDC was up to the challenge and built the “Spaceblimp” you see in the gallery above.

We talked to HacDC’s Alberto Gaitán about his team’s experience during the Spaceblimp project, which started earlier in the spring. Many of you may actually know Gaitán as a new media artist, who has worked in D.C. for the last 30 years, but obviously his tech chops easily transfer over to some “creative science” as well (a particular skill set that warms this writer’s heart). The HacDC members who participated in the R&D of the Spaceblimp project are mostly engineers (hardware, software and wetware — one of them is a geneticist/bio-informaticist).

The winners of Hackerspaces in Space won’t be announced until the end of September, but we do know the Spaceblimp, which cost $320 to make and is carrying a Canon PowerShot SD300 running a “Canon Hack Development Kit” in its payload, reached 60,000 feet where the temperature is a chilly negative-140 degrees Fahrenheit, when the balloon popped and the payload came back to Earth. I spoke with Gaitán about the Spaceblimp project — what can come out of a challenge to private citizens to send balloons into space? — and made the gallery above from HacDC’s amazing Flickr set.