Prediction tools are a big part of it. The US government publishes global wind data every 6 hours, as well as tools that can be used to parse and process this

Prediction tools are a big part of it. The US government publishes global wind data every 6 hours, as well as tools that can be used to parse and process this data. We've done a bunch of scripting on top of that to automatically email, sms, and tweet launch opportunities. The team doing the predictions is too busy/lazy to upload their code to our github account(https://github.com/whitestarballoon/ https://github.com/whitestarballoon/), and that's the only reason it isn't open source. We can drop ballast to maintain altitude, but we don't have any other control. As a result, we must wait for the winds. (You can see an example prediction feed here: https://twitter.com/WSBFlightPath https://twitter.com/WSBFlightPath Cryptic, but it's meant for the launch team). The Japanese balloons were examples of exquisite analog engineering. The Army made a great video documenting their construction and operation (available here: http://www.archive.org/details/gov.archives.arc.13084 http://www.archive.org/details/gov.archives.arc.13084).