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Craig Ryan has a new book out next week about Joe Kittinger, "Come Up and Get Me". Kittinger was one of the main drivers behind the Stargazer series as he thought the astronomy that could be done was worth doing the flights, so this book will probably provide more detail.
From "The Pre-Astronauts", the goals of Stargazer were:
1. To measure atmospheric turbulence
2. To measure star brightness variations caused by high-altitude turbulence; and
3. To reveal how water vapour in the air affects light emanating from planets and stars.
It doesn't sound like much of a goal, considering the size of the project, but the goals were scaled back due to a lot of balloon and other equipment failures during the early unmanned Stargazer flights. The astrolab flown on Stargazer weighed well over two tonnes! That's a lot of weight under a balloon.
The earlier Stratoscope payload was over 3 tonnes!
Cheers,
Jason.
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