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Space Science

More on High-Altitude Balloonists 134

Posted by michael from the what-goes-up dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The Guardian reports on an attempt at the record for the highest balloon flight. 'A bag of helium the size of the Empire State building to challenge Nasa record.'" We had an article about them a few months ago.
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More on High-Altitude Balloonists More

More on High-Altitude Balloonists

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  • Just imagine (Score:2, Funny)

    by TCM ( 130219 )
    how long you could speak in a high-pitched voice from that one! And they waste it to fly around, pfff..

  • uh oh! (Score:5, Funny)

    by garcia ( 6573 ) * on Friday July 11, 2003 @07:54AM (#6413991)
    their lives will depend on exquisitely accurate weather forecasts

    They're doomed.
    • ...they have quality Russian-made pressure suits. ;)

    • Weather Forecasts (Score:1, Insightful)

      by jinglecat ( 673072 )
      Excuse me, I would like to see how correct you would be at forecasting the weather by appling your partial differential equations solving skills and see if you can solve multvariate equations with a slew of unknowns using wide resolution spacing and generalized approximations of how the atmosphere works....

      ...And do this BILLIONS of times per second.

      Numerical Weather Prediction has come a long way in the last 15 years, so stop complaining. Change to another forecaster if you don't like the one who "se

    • Re:uh oh! (Score:4, Funny)

      by scalis ( 594038 ) on Friday July 11, 2003 @06:32PM (#6420707) Homepage
      their lives will depend on exquisitely accurate weather forecasts

      "Above the clouds, we predict a sunny day and a cool night. Same as yesterday. And tomorrow for that matter."

  • Please let the helium bag be... (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    sh'aped as King Kong.

    Please.

  • Just remind them... (Score:5, Funny)

    by StaceyRey ( 687641 ) on Friday July 11, 2003 @08:04AM (#6414039) Journal

    ...to pack a pellet gun and a brown-bag lunch. After the balloon comes down (after crossing LAX's approach path, of course), the lawn chair used for the flight will be up for auction on eBay.

  • Visible (Score:5, Informative)

    by WebfishUK ( 249858 ) on Friday July 11, 2003 @08:08AM (#6414063)
    Worth noting that the ballon is so large that once airborne it will be visible over a radius of some 600 miles. Its being launched on the south coats of cornwall so most of England, Ireland and Wales and Northern France will be able to see it.

    I bet the bastards launch at night though....

    • Well, if they launch at night it will be harder for the tethered craft to get good images (for mission control and of course press purposes), so while I don't know for sure, I'd bet that they'll aim for a launch with some light.
    • nope - 7AM launch unless weather buggers things up. So yeah - I bet the bastards launch at night

    • Re:Visible (Score:5, Informative)

      by mountain_penguin ( 43679 ) on Friday July 11, 2003 @09:29AM (#6414646) Homepage
      saw a program on this on the TV the other night
      The flight is going to take 9 hours and they are going to launch in the morning to be home in time for tea
      • The flight is going to take 9 hours and they are going to launch in the morning to be home in time for tea

        According to the article: "The whole exercise will take 12 hours or more."

        Perhaps the exact timing is still a bit up in the air.
        (sorry -- just had to say that)

  • Having Read the Article (Score:4, Funny)

    by Jonsey ( 593310 ) on Friday July 11, 2003 @08:11AM (#6414074) Journal
    Their claims are full of hot air.

    Someone was gonna say it. You know it.
  • what payloads such a baloon can lift.
    Shouldn't it be possible to lift a rocket to that height and starting from there?

    • Re:I wonder (Score:3, Interesting)

      by gallen1234 ( 565989 )
      According to the article the fabric is rather delicate - strong winds are enough to cancel the flight. I don't know whether or not this particular fabric is a design requirement but the way things are right now I don't think I'd want a rocket going off anywhere nearby.
    • http://www.xprize.com/teams/ilat.html
    • Since the baloon is so fragile I don't think it would be possible (in this case) to lift such a weight. And, don't forget, that at a lower altitude, the baloon isn't totally expanded, so it isn't pushing stuff up as much as it can at a higher altitude.

      But in theory that can be done. But, is it cost effective?? Really don't know. Besides, since you apparently need very good weather (that could be solved with a more resistant baloon) I think you wouldn't want to wait for a launch until you had good weather.

      • A balloon lifts the exact same amount of weight at every altitude during its ascent. The key is that the amount of gas it contains is constant, which means that the number of gas particles displaced is constant in order to keep pressure and temperature the same on both sides. Therefore, the lift is constant.

  • Other High-Altitude Baloons (Score:4, Informative)

    by TrollBridge ( 550878 ) on Friday July 11, 2003 @08:14AM (#6414094) Homepage Journal
    The real high-altitude balloon record-holder [slashdot.org], surprisingly, was not mentioned in this article.

  • the curvature of the earth (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 11, 2003 @08:21AM (#6414135)
    The interesting thing, too me at least, is seeing
    the curvature of the earth. When I was a functionally
    check flight weapon systems officer for the F-4E some
    years ago, I used to see the curvature of the Earth at
    50,000 feet. And now, we didn't use pressure suits...

  • Optimists... (Score:4, Funny)

    by perly-king-69 ( 580000 ) on Friday July 11, 2003 @08:27AM (#6414165)
    "The two adventurers need cloudless skies, high pressure, gentle winds and a 72-hour forecast in which they can be confident." ..and they're flying from SW England?!!!
    • If they were really optimists they would use hydrogen instead of helium.
      • Actually, helium as benefits when used under very low temperatures. Although not getting to such low temperatures, the boiling point of hidrogen is higher than of helium, because hidrogen is a two atom molecule and helium is a monoatomic gas. So, if going to a very low temperatures (aparently not the case, but I'm not sure), helium would still be a gas while hidrogen would be a liquid, which wouldn't help in a floating process.

  • Boiling Blood (Score:5, Informative)

    by LudditeMind ( 587926 ) on Friday July 11, 2003 @08:29AM (#6414181)
    At about 44,000ft, you need to be wearing a pressure suit, because if not the blood will start to heat and actually boil.

    It's my understanding that the blood wouldn't actually heat, it would boil because of the lack of pressure. Am I wrong?

    • Re:Boiling Blood (Score:3, Informative)

      by nherc ( 530930 )
      Considering it'd be -60C up there I'd think you are correct.
      • The air be at -60C but since they'll be so little of it it won't remove much heat from a liquid so
        any liquid would keep at its current temperature for much longer than if on the ground. That of course is if it didn't boil away.

    • Re:Boiling Blood (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Viol8 ( 599362 )
      The blood would only boil if exposed to the outside. What is never mentioned is that the
      body itself would keep the blood under pressure at least for a while so it wouldn't be a simple
      case of bubbling in the veins , it would be a far more unpleasent case of blood leaking out from all orifices THEN boiling.
      Remember that at most the pressure difference between inside and outside the body can only ever be 1 atmosphere which is equivalent to a
      a scuba diver coming up from a 30 foot dive too fast. Yes it'll

      • Re:Boiling Blood (Score:3, Interesting)

        by avandesande ( 143899 )
        This exploding human stuff is urban legend. I think there would be a certain amount of degassing in your veins which would give you a deadly case of 'the bends'

        • Re:Boiling Blood (Score:5, Informative)

          by Rolo Tomasi ( 538414 ) on Friday July 11, 2003 @09:33AM (#6414682) Homepage Journal
          Yeah, people don't just explode in vacuum. I think the notion comes from bad movies ... the only realistic scene depicting humans in vacuum that I can remember was in 2001, where that Dave guy gets back into the spaceship. He even correctly uses the escaping air to propel himself into the ship. Pretty cool if you think about it.

          • Re:Boiling Blood (Score:2, Informative)

            by xannik ( 534808 )
            Another good depiction is the seen in the SciFi horror film Event Horizon where "baby bear" (under the influence of the ship) depressurizes himself and floats out into the vacuum with blood pouring out his eyes and alls sorts of places.
            • Amongst myself and my friends, "Event Horizon" is the yardstick by which we measure bad movies. We went in expecting a sci-fi film, but too soon realized it was a horror/ unwitting comedy.

              "We need something to latch onto.."

              "Hey! There's the communications module!"
              *kerunch*

              I can understand filling the detaching 'tunnel' with exploding bolts. But actual explosives? And who was the idiot who said, "And hey, wouldn't it be handy if they were portable, and had their own timers?"

              *shudders*

              Mission to Mars
    • Arthur C. Clarke said that a human being could live in vacuum for a minute or so. Such an event was dramatized in "2001: A Space Odyssey," and during its first run in New York they handed out little leaflets with a few paragraphs by Clarke insisting that this depiction was correct.

      Was Arthur C. Clarke wrong?
      • Yeah, he was.
        The best depiction of what would happen to a human in vacuum was in Schwarzenegger's Total Recall. First your head swells up, then your eyeballs get to about 4x their size, then your head explodes.
        I mean, didn't you see the movie?

  • Just Scary? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by C0deJunkie ( 309293 ) on Friday July 11, 2003 @08:32AM (#6414200) Homepage Journal
    "We have done some pretty vivid demonstrations of putting half a pint of water in a decompression chamber and decompressing it to 100,000ft and the water boils and explodes in less than half a second, just disappears. It's scary stuff,"
    And this is just scary??
    I really hope their pressured suite are going to keep them safe from this....or we will see a really bad picture at their return....
    Is anyone beside me asking himself if this adventure is just worth the risk?
    • Yes, I am also asking if it's worth the risk. It's certainly cool and all, but it's amazing to me what risks some people will take to do something just to do it. Best of luck to them tho'! They're gonna need it.
    • Except that this doesn't happen to liquid enclosed in a membrane - e.g. skin. The USAF have tried it: if you preload your bloodstream with oxygen, you can survive for a couple of minutes in near-vacuum. Arther C Clarke included this in some stories. The only uncomfortable thing that happens before you die of oxygen starvation is your eyeballs dry up.

      Of course, if you want to have the luxury of breathing, you need to have some air pressure in your lings. And your chest isn't strong enough to hold any signif

    • Not _quite_ that scary (Score:4, Informative)

      by MenTaLguY ( 5483 ) on Friday July 11, 2003 @09:26AM (#6414623) Homepage
      Bear in mind that their skin and all those other solid bits actually does contribute a bit to maintaining the pressure of e.g. their blood.

      This has been borne out by experiments with primates and a few decompression accidents with humans.

      Yes, decompression would still kill them, but mostly just as a consequence of asphyxiation (albeit accompanied by very painful swelling). They certainly won't explode.

      While they still might look a bit grotesque, there needn't be any worries about having to crack the suits and ladle the corpses into buckets afterwards or anything like that.

  • While this is cool, how about using balloons (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ahfoo ( 223186 ) on Friday July 11, 2003 @08:37AM (#6414228) Journal
    as an assist for a conventional rocket?
    I wrote a letter to Aerostar, the largest commercial hotair balloon manufacturer in the States, about their largest model, the Aero 245 asking about maximum payload and altitude and I never heard back.
    But I did find that they were only around 75 grand a piece. What I was wondering was if you took like five of those to say 40,000 feet towing a rocket and then launched from there, wouldn't you be able to get a lot more bang for your buck than from say a similar operation using a customized jet airliner that costs millions to modify and operate?
    I mean this high altitude stunt stuff is cool and all, but I'm very curious as to why balloons can't be a practical element in launching satellites and such.

    • Rockoon (Score:3, Informative)

      by wowbagger ( 69688 ) *
      The technique is called
      rockoon [google.com]

      and is often used for altitude records.

      However, its utility for getting into orbit is somewhat less, as all a rockoon gets you is above some of the air resistance - to get to orbit requires speed, not just alititude.
      • I believe this is the technique being used by the Israeli X-Prize team, though -- they're using a re-usable balloon instead of a first-stage rocket to save on fuel. The second stage should be capable of picking up the required speed.
      • The rockoon stuff was interesting though it seemed to have dropped off pretty quickly by the 1960s. I'm with you on the speed/altitude issue, but wouldn't you agree that you can trade inexpensively gained altitude for precious speed? I checked out that link to the Israeli X-Prize team and although it's a related idea, it doesn't seem to use the method I had in mind which is to initially drop the rocket downwards in an arc rather than going for a more or less vertical launch at altitude.
    • wondering was if you took like five of those to say 40,000 feet towing a rocket and then launched from there

      And throw away all that helium on every launch? Or did you also have some plan to retrieve and resue it? Send a compressor and some empty tanks up and pump down the balloons?

    • This X-prize candidate team is using the concept. http://www.xprize.com/teams/davinci.html However, looking at standard rocketry analysis, it seems that the advantages of baloon launch are relatively minor for orbital flight, since most of the energy in the rocket is used for acceleration to orbital velocity. The dynamic pressure of the thicker atmosphere below 10,000 to 20,000 feet becomes rather small in the grand scheme of things because that altitude is passed so quickly. For more information: Flight [xprize.com]

  • dangerous? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Blitzshlag ( 685207 ) on Friday July 11, 2003 @08:38AM (#6414235)
    They're ascending at 1000ft/min with a balloon the size of the Empire State Building, which is as thin as a freezer bag. So one bird strike and they're done right?
    • Ahh, but you forgot about speed. Unlike a plane, this thing isn't going to be travelling very fast, so it's hardly going to speed into a flock of birds approaching from the opposite direction. They might sit on it and enjoy the ride for a bit though.

    • Re:dangerous? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by codegen ( 103601 )
      Not really. A balloon of this type can take a few holes. All that happens is that the balloon starts to loose presure and comes down. Last summer there was an interesting case here in Canada where a scientific package was sent up by weather balloon. It had an eject to release the instruments which would parachute down. The eject failed. So they sent some military jets up to shoot the balloon down. Put many 50 cal. holes in the balloon. The balloon was in Northern Europe before it finally came down (even
  • For a mere second I thought this was going to be about Richard Branson and had the sudden urge to shoot him down.... Where's a rail gun when you one?
  • they climb into their Russian spacesuits, strap themselves into their cockpit chairs, slowly inflate the biggest balloon ever made, and float towards the heavens

    New Mexico (CNN):

    Late this evening, a tumbleweed farmer reported what appeared to be a crashed alien spacecraft, complete with a cockpit populated by a pair of extraterrestrial pilots squawking at each other [about using a cell phone around massive amounts of helium] before the farmer shot them with his shotgun. The silverish spacecraft and p
  • the cool thing about the 1961 NASA mission was that when they reached 130,000 fet the pilot jumped out, and began free falling past the speed of sound before opening the parachute.

    • Re:cool thing (Score:4, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 11, 2003 @10:02AM (#6414973)
      "However, by diving or "standing up" in free fall, any experienced skydiver can learn to reach speeds of over 160-180MPH. Speeds of over 200MPH require significant practice to achieve. The record free fall speed, done without any special equipment, is 321MPH. Obviously, it is desirable to slow back down to 110MPH before parachute opening."

      - http://hypertextbook.com/facts/JianHuang.shtml [hypertextbook.com]

      How did he get enough speed to break the sound barrier? He would have needed a jet to speed his descent or something like that.

      |
      • No jet needed, at those altitudes, air friction is greatly reduced, so terminal velocity is increased.

        TimeZone

      • I belive he strapped a JATO to his back like that guy did out west with his Impala.

        No seriously!!! It's true. I heard it from a friend of a friend of a lady who used to take her dog to the same groomer as the once-removed aunt of the guy who did it.

      • Very little air = very little resistance. The link you quote assumes people are falling at normal altitudes.

  • Darwin Awards (Score:3, Funny)

    by berkeleyjunk ( 250251 ) on Friday July 11, 2003 @09:10AM (#6414491)
    The contenders for the 2003 darwin awards are...

  • Mission Want Ad (Score:5, Funny)

    by WC as Kato ( 675505 ) on Friday July 11, 2003 @09:14AM (#6414527)
    Want Ad
    -------
    Wanted 2 open minded people willing to create scientific history by piloting the world's largest craft to record setting heights. See beautiful scenery of the Earth and heavens not seen by most people.

    Fine print
    ----------
    The high-tech craft is really a giant thin walled helium balloon with a small gondola
    Inaccurate weather forecast may kill you
    Oxygen will be forced into your lungs
    Your blood may boil
    Your blood may vaporize
    You must withstand the terror of impending death for at least 12 hours
    Spacesuit made in Russia.
    Solid 'low-residue' foods must be consumed before flight
    If everything is not perfect, death arrives within 30 seconds.

    We are an equal opportunity employer. All are encouraged to apply. Principles only. Do not bring lawyers.

  • Stratosphere or Space. Penny wise or Pound-foolish.
    http://www.wired.com/wired/archive /8.08/helium.htm l
  • Reading this article summary (HAH, you think i'd actually RTFA?)reminded me of one of my favorite greek myths.

    Icarus.

  • After checking out their site for a while, I have come to the conclusion that this project is relying on a lot of luck. I work for NASA's Balloon Program Office [nasa.gov], and we fly balloons of this size and bigger. For one, this project has their balloon being made by a manufacturer that doesnt make balloons. Balloons of this size are a QA nightmare. Having miles of load tape and polyethylene, they are very hard to manufacture and test. Polyethylene is the same stuff they make sandwich baggies out of, very del

  • Intriguing development (Score:4, Funny)

    by CommieLib ( 468883 ) on Friday July 11, 2003 @10:15AM (#6415088) Homepage
    A bag of helium the size of the Empire State building

    Teddy Kennedy is working for NASA now?

  • Website for Details (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The website for the attempt is at QinetiQ 1 [qinetiq1.com]

    Its worthwhile noting that they will launch from the back of a trimaran warship research vessel [qinetiq.com], and will be observed from the highest flying powered, tethered UAV ever [qinetiq.com].

    So it will demonstrate a whole slew of new technologies, real Slashdot stuff.
  • They might as well continue to the moon and bring some cheese back home.
  • Excuse me, BUT...

    If anything goes wrong, if the suits fail, death would take about half a second.

    This subject was discussed in science and science fiction decades ago. And I don't mean the slow motion exploding bodies in Total Recall. Last I heard, human skin is gas tight and really needs only the type of support an elastic suit provides to prevent major injury from vacuum. Also, suffocation takes minutes, not fractions of a second.

    "Once you get past about 33,000ft, you are unable to breathe unaide

  • I speak bad english, and have only a basic knowledge of physics. That said, here is my thoughts:

    We all know that when you go up you store energy. It's basic physics. So, what if you can get a baloon big enough to lift some kind of craft. Let it go really up (Almost no air there, so wind resistance is a much smaller issue), then drop it. After falling for a while it should have tremendous speed (or kinetic energy), level it up and use rockets to get it to go even higher than the balloon. Since the escape ve

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