The technical aspect of it will sell at a fairly low level until
the chinese put a man on the moon, then the politico's will scream about
how the US is being eclipsed technically, and we start having sputnik
flashbacks. then parents may encourage their children to look at
technical pursuits.

I agree that the ATV ballooning aspect is a good approach for
generating interest. I was heading up a ballooning effort when other ARS
related activities made it take a back seat. But it has the potential
for some really interesting work that amateurs can participate in.


Amateur TV on a balloon or maybe by a ham in a Cesna airplane would be
interesting. Also, along with the NTSC link, do a digital TV one as
well (the encoder and modulator side of things can be bought at not
outrageous cost, and the receive end can be a consumer digital TV tuned
to a "cable" channel that happens to be the ham band). "Yeah, but a
cell phone does that", but not at this level of picture quality.