I considered sending the data to the ground, but the transmitter/receiver equipment would complicate the package more then storage the data on the device would. There are many micro controller on the market that have a relatively large capacity on chip. There should be one available that should work. Right now I am looking at the TI MSP430 series because of the development board that is available. I have already bought one and have goofed around with it and it looks pretty cool.

For people that need/want fast data sampling or just want to store data for long flights (gliders, endurance planes) there is the possibility of using flash memory off chip. The SD interface is said to be very easy to work with, and under the assumption that I have the data channels available after interfacing with the 3-axis accelerometer it should just be a simple circuit and a matter of code to dump data to the flash chip. The great part about this is that the flash chip could be removed and if I dump he data in an intelligent manner, be easily read as a text file on the computer. This would also make using the data for plotting much easier.