GRATEFULNESS

All my gratefulness in the first place to my three loves: my son Nicolas my daughter Aldana and my wife Karina. I Wish to thank their patience during the countless hours that I spent in front of the PC or in a library, devoted to this project. Also their support and encouragement to keep on with it.

Much of the information provided in this website came from "inside sources" working in the ballooning field, in research institutes, or universities around the the world. They prefer to remain anonymous but I know perfectly whom they are, and I'm truly and deeply grateful of their support and the mutual confidence.

Doris "Archangel" J. Morris, librarian of the Goddard Space Flight Center (NASA) in Wallops, USA by its incredible collaboration. If it had not been by its aid -that allowed me to obtain key data for my research- StratoCat would not exist.

Dwight Bawcom, former Operations Manager from NASA balloon program. Its wisdom and knowledge was a key factor to the deep change done on StratoCat in 2008.

Gregory Kennedy, a friend in the distance and another person whom shares this passion by scientific ballooning, who gave me the tremendous honor of allowing me to work with the correction of his Book about the project Manhigh.

Pablo Rusca whom granted access to the impressive library of the Instituto de Astronomia y Fisica del Espacio (IAFE) and allowing me to obtain a great amount of information as well previously unpublished pictures on regard the past balloon activities at IAFE.

Marcelo Salvia, from ZERO ORBITAL wich provide us with highly professional map's of balloon's flight paths reconstructed from original GPS records.

Leslie Forehand and Sonja Stevenson, of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) library. They sent to me by mail copies of several NCAR's publications that allowed me to fill several information "gaps", besides to cause that the mailman of my district hates my. Also very specially to Judy Dayhoff who scanned and sent me by e-mail a lot of useful balloon related documents.

To Alejandro Agostinelli, the person behind Dios! and Factor 302.4 by his support to the idea behind this site.

To Diego Zúñiga captain of La Nave de los Locos (Fool's ship) and a great friend of mine.

To Vicente Juan Ballester-Olmos, from Fotocat Project by its disinterested cession of a chapter of a book he wrote "Expedientes Insólitos" and by its constant contribution to the project.

In this section are included, divided by countries and in alphabetical order, all the people and institutions that helped us in a way or other, including those websites that linked us. Believe it or not, remeber it or not, but, if your name appear in this list, you had contributed in a way or another to this project.

To carry out a project like StratoCat is only possible with the right tools. They are:

Araneae: a very simple HTML text oriented editor, developed by Mark McIntyre

CSVed: a little but very powerfull program that allows to edit CSV files. It was created by Sam Francke

Irfan View: an excelent image manager with basic edition options. Developed by Irfan Skiljan

jBox a powerful and flexible jQuery plugin. Developed by Stephan Wagner.

PPWIZARD this is StratoCat's heart. An HTML pre-processor very powerfull that allows to develope "dynamical" sites without using PHP or ASP. Created by Dennis Bareis

Replace Text: a little piece of wonderful software to make massive replacements. Plenty of usefull options it was developed by Bill Klein

Timeline JS: a very simple to use system to create highly professional timelines, developed by Zach Wise

Xenu's Link Sleuth an utility that checks Web sites for broken links. Created by Tilman Hausherr