Hey Ryan,
Your projects sounds great, I like the way you are incorporating 4 or 5 different flight vehicles to take the images.
Not sure what your timeline is, but there are a few things coming up that might help answer some questions about balloon mapping and tying it to environmental mapping.
We are doing a Balloon Mapping workshop and image stitching session as part of Philly Tech Week (
http://meetu.ps/2Ggd10)
. At the flight workshop we will have a folks that have flown a number of balloons, kites and used pole mapping for different projects. The second event that day (http://meetu.ps/2Ggd0Z) will be twofold, learn to build camera rigs from juice bottles and use MapKnitter to stitch together imagery for use in other projects.
If you'd like, we can schedule a Skype session and talk about what you've got going on, some similar projects going on in the region and particular discuss and questions you may have.
-sean