As a Montana State University research team prepares to send a novel space computer to the moon in 2023 for its ultimate test, a high-altitude balloon flight in South Dakota last week marked yet more progress on the technology while offering a unique student experience.

When the Rubik’s Cube-sized computer prototype lifted into clear sky above Sioux Falls on July 27, dangling beneath the jellyfish-like helium balloon, it was the culmination of more than a year of hard work by electrical engineering master’s student Justin Williams and three other MSU students participating in the launch at a facility run by the balloon contractor Raven Aerostar.

"It was kind of stressful watching the balloon go up, waiting to see the signal show up on our phones,” said Williams, a Kalispell native who earned his bachelor’s in computer engineering from MSU in 2020. “When the data started coming in, we all took a big breath of relief.”

As it hovered for more than 30 hours at altitudes up to 70,000 feet, above the protection normally afforded by Earth’s atmosphere, the prototype was subjected to the high-energy radiation particles it’s designed to withstand using a creative new approach. Traditionally, computers operating on satellites and spacecraft have costly and cumbersome circuitry made of special materials to resist the radiation emitted by the sun and other celestial bodies. The MSU-developed technology, called RadPC, instead combines multiple ordinary computer processors with innovative software to create on-the-fly redundancy, allowing computations to continue even if radiation disrupts the computer's sensitive memory.

Last week’s mission added to a long list of RadPC prototypes flying on high-altitude balloons, small satellites and the International Space Station, each advancing different aspects of the technology. All the tests involved the RadPC computer performing various pre-programmed tasks while monitoring whether the computer recovered from any radiation events. The latest balloon flight was focused on testing an external computer memory system that Williams designed. He and others will analyze the data in coming months to see how the prototype performed.

"It’s kind of surreal when you’re so focused on getting the hardware to work but then step back and remember that thing is going to the moon,” Williams said. “You realize how cool it is to be working on this.”

Brock LaMeres, professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in MSU’s Norm Asbjornson College of Engineering, came up with the RadPC concept more than a decade ago. Since then, development of the technology has involved 70 undergraduates, 17 graduate students and nearly a dozen faculty, including staff engineers in the Space Science and Engineering Laboratory housed in the Department of Physics in MSU's College of Letters and Science. The project has been fueled by roughly $5 million in funding, mostly from NASA.

In 2019, RadPC was one of 12 science and technology payloads that won a coveted spot to journey to the lunar surface as part of NASA's Artemis program, which aims to establish a human presence on the moon in 2024 as a step toward a manned mission to Mars. The program is intended to serve as a demonstration of commercial landers developed by private companies, and the MSU payload will be bolted to the side of a lander called Blue Ghost that’s being developed by Texas-based Firefly Aerospace.

“Every one of these flights is maturing the technology, getting it to a point where we’re proving that it works and that it could actually be used on spacecraft,” LaMeres said. “It’s cool because the whole team is working together on this same computer technology, but each student has their own piece of it to work on leading up to the lunar mission.”

Zach Becker, a nontraditional undergraduate student majoring in electrical and computer engineering, designed the system that relays and stores the RadPC data for analysis. He’ll continue to work on a similar system for another RadPC prototype that’s set to visit the space station next year.

"It's pretty amazing to be able to write computer code that will operate in space,” Becker said. “To live in Montana and work on this, it’s a tremendous opportunity.”