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This group has flown an "airship" to 95,000 feet (over 28.5 km or over 17.9 miles): http://www.jpaerospace.com/Tan...

Maybe a good fit for JP Aerospace and their Airship To Orbit project

Maybe a good fit for JP Aerospace and their Airship To Orbit project

Huh. okay, may I suggest you completely black out a basement somewhere and go visit "space" much more cheaply then? Depending on your location earplugs might also help.

Freefall is not an artifact of motion - it's the natural state of all things not mechanically connected to a much stronger gravity source, aka not on a planet(oid). If you are in space (as a physical location), you are either in freefall, or being subjected to non-uniform acceleration (rockets, rotation, etc)

As for perspective - detail would be even better in an airplane, and the horizon wouldn't be much closer. At 30km the curvature of the earth would be more obvious, but still it's only about 617km away*. Go up in the US midwest and you won't even be able to see any oceans. At 100km you've at least pushed the horizon out to 1121km, still not enough to see the the whole US at once (which is 4500km E-W at it's widest point), but if you were orbiting it would only take a few minutes to see both edges.

Where G forces are concerned, I'm not really a fan, I think the Airship to Orbit idea is a much cooler approach if they can pull it off, and the Dark Sky Stations could make for cool novelty hotels. But as far as being in space is concerned I think energy delta is a much better measure than physical position, and by that measure even if you get completely free of the atmosphere you're energetically still only about 5% of the way into space, by the definition of "not immediately falling back to Earth"

* if you'd like to play with some numbers the horizon distance (along the surface) of a sphere = radius * asec (1 + height/radius), just make sure you're getting the angle in radians. For our 30km balloon on Earth , and using cosine rather than secant for compatibility, that's horizon = 6371km * acos ( 1 / ( 1 + 30km / 6371km ) )

This group has been toying with the idea for ages.

http://www.jpaerospace.com/

I think it is still their plan.

Let's start by observing the inevitable. Large rocket launches even when they aren't orbital are heavily regulated. You can't escape it even if you're doing covert launches out of a third world wilderness. The Man gets real uptight over unauthorized rocket launches and that's that.

I have indirect experience with US regulation for launching rockets and other things via my work for JP Aerospace. There are a bunch of things to consider here. First, regulators love a good track record. That means among other things you need to have a record of regulation-compliant launches before you try anything big or urgent.

Doing that gives you cover in a number of ways. If they decide you did something wrong, you have the good faith defense that you did this way in the past few launches without incident.

Similarly, if someone tries to block your activity via bogus regulatory or safety concern (the aerospace industry has long been notorious for using such techniques to harass competitors), then you have the means to contest these obstacles (by pointing out successful launches in the past). If you want to have access to multiple sites, you need a good track record for each site and its bureaucratic requirements. Finally, you can push the regulatory envelop and try (legally and safely of course) new technologies or techniques in order to establish a history for those.

So a track record is good.

Second, take this regulation seriously and come up with ways to do it efficiently rather than bypass it illegally. For example, US regulators want you to fill out every form. So no photocopying the old launch paperwork even though the new one is exactly the same. Learn the quirks of each process you have to do.

I would also refrain from asking publicly about ways around regulation as you did above. That's huge fail right there should you end up in an audit or trial at some point.

Third, treat such paperwork as a launch requirement. You have to have this paperwork at such and such stage before launch or it's "no go". You should have a really good idea how many man-hours it takes to fill out the forms for a give location and level of regulatory compliance.

There's probably certain paperwork that some inspector can ask for that would nix your flight, if it comes up missing. Treat it like you would your rocket or your payload and never leave home without it and perhaps a copy or two.

If you have regulatory obstacles to a particular technology, like your gunpowder igniter, you can either get a waiver for that (which is a whole lot easier to obtain IMHO with a good track record) or develop an alternate technology that bypasses the regulation. Just do it, don't risk your flight, program, and personal freedom on cutting that particular corner.

Finally, you have some ability to shop around for launch sites. Always have backup sites scoped out in case you can't use the original site.

To summarize, don't play games with this stuff, make it a part of your launch process every time, and good luck.

Or we, being libertarian, could consider private side approaches. While space-based private exploration and science is in its infancy, it's worth noting that it is done.

For example, the Planetary Society has several projects cooking. I don't agree with the ideological baggage that comes attached (they're uncritical boosters of NASA's unmanned science program), but at least they practice what they preach. One could do worse than send them some money.

There's also a large number of non profits developing launch prototypes all over the world. I think that's a bit oversaturated, but I do volunteer on occasion for JP Aerospace, who does high altitude balloons and the occasional balloon-launched rocket.

And of course, there are actual start ups to invest in. I have an non-business interest in Altius Space Machines because I'm acquainted with the founder, Jon Goff who is one of the more insightful bloggers out there on space development topics.

1 out of 3 dollars spent is for "national defense." 33% is a pretty big "small" portion right off that bat.

That's a good example of what I refer to. US military spending is epic in its waste. For example, I was part of a non profit team that put an airship prototype up to 95k feet, which is a world record. The total cost over a number of years was somewhere around a hundred thousand dollars. The US military has paid over a hundred million dollars for an airship that failed in flight. Three orders of magnitude less cost and something that actually worked.

But then US military procurement is massively corrupt. For example, small caliber ammunition was for a time manufactured by a single plant in Missouri. When it couldn't keep up with ammunition demand after the Iraqi invasion in 2003, they finally opened up ammunition production to competition. This paper describes the issues surrounding that shortage. From it (emphasized phrase by me):

The reduction in funding during these years also affected the United Statesâ(TM) ammunition production capability resulting in a steady decline since the Cold War. Since 1989, there has been a 68% decrease in the capacity of the munitions industrial base. The number of facilities mirrors this decline. Government owned facilities fell from 28 to 13, and privately owned facilities decreased from 163 to 69. The production of small arms ammunition has been consolidated in a single government owned facility at Lake City Army Ammunition Plant at Lake City, Missouri.

It's also worth noting that defense spending is not 1 in 3 dollars, but rather 1 in 5 due to the presence of considerable entitlement spending into Social Security and Medicare (neither which serve a national interest I might add).

1 out of 3 dollars spent is for "national defense." 33% is a pretty big "small" portion right off that bat.

That's a good example of what I refer to. US military spending is epic in its waste. For example, I was part of a non profit team that put an airship prototype up to 95k feet, which is a world record. The total cost over a number of years was somewhere around a hundred thousand dollars. The US military has paid over a hundred million dollars for an airship that failed in flight. Three orders of magnitude less cost and something that actually worked.

But then US military procurement is massively corrupt. For example, small caliber ammunition was for a time manufactured by a single plant in Missouri. When it couldn't keep up with ammunition demand after the Iraqi invasion in 2003, they finally opened up ammunition production to competition. This paper describes the issues surrounding that shortage. From it (emphasized phrase by me):

The reduction in funding during these years also affected the United Statesâ(TM) ammunition production capability resulting in a steady decline since the Cold War. Since 1989, there has been a 68% decrease in the capacity of the munitions industrial base. The number of facilities mirrors this decline. Government owned facilities fell from 28 to 13, and privately owned facilities decreased from 163 to 69. The production of small arms ammunition has been consolidated in a single government owned facility at Lake City Army Ammunition Plant at Lake City, Missouri.

It's also worth noting that defense spending is not 1 in 3 dollars, but rather 1 in 5 due to the presence of considerable entitlement spending into Social Security and Medicare (neither which serve a national interest I might add).

It allows you to do some pretty remarkable things on the cheap. For example, I was part of a group that sent a remote controlled airship up to 95,000 feet (which incidentally would be a world record, if we had gone through the considerable trouble to certify it). Overall cost was probably no more than $100k and a few man-years of volunteer labor (including previous launches of more normal high altitude balloons to prove some technology pieces we had trouble with).

What is a bit unusual about high altitude balloons is that it's not hard for a group of amateurs to craft balloon vehicles that are comparable to the current state of the art in some measures of performance. You're not going to duplicate the full performance and capabilities of a DoD funded reconnaissance platform costing hundreds of millions of dollars to develop.

But you can develop balloon platforms that can exceed the performance of that monster in a number of basic ways. No other aerospace field has this. For example, in our case above, it's like being able to make a home-made remote controlled plane with a substantially higher altitude ceiling than a U-2.

You still need to dump energy getting down. That is why heat shields get so hot, as it is the atmosphere + shield which is absorbing all of the kinetic energy of the spacecraft on its way back to the surface.

An alternative solutions has been proposed by JP Aerospace with an alternative launch + reentry vehicle design that uses airships rather than rockets. It seems like a really crazy idea as it is something that nobody else has even considered and doesn't really have anything to be used in comparison. Still, JP Aerospace seems to have a whole lot of experience with high altitude balloons and being able to operate them from a high altitude remotely. Their goal is to send hundreds of tons of supplies into orbit for under a million dollars. If they can pull it off, it would radically change commercial spaceflight. There would still be a need for conventional rockets, but they would be fast couriers rather than the only game in town.

The question that students ask when they hit geometry/trig ("when will I ever use this") is reasonable...unless you're going on to higher math, those two subjects are nearly useless.

Or you build or design something nontrivial. I had to make by hand some foam ellipsoid partitions for a balloon structure. (In the picture in the first link, that's me, Karl sucking up polystyrene shavings like an intellectual giant, I wore a mask for the next one.) Making accurate true ellipsoid markings and cuts is not that difficult, but one needs to understand the geometry of ellipses and make some trig calculations to get the right numbers.

The question that students ask when they hit geometry/trig ("when will I ever use this") is reasonable...unless you're going on to higher math, those two subjects are nearly useless.

Or you build or design something nontrivial. I had to make by hand some foam ellipsoid partitions for a balloon structure. (In the picture in the first link, that's me, Karl sucking up polystyrene shavings like an intellectual giant, I wore a mask for the next one.) Making accurate true ellipsoid markings and cuts is not that difficult, but one needs to understand the geometry of ellipses and make some trig calculations to get the right numbers.

I have wondered why we don't just use massive helium balloons to carry rockets much closer to space

Check out JP Aerospace who have been working on the "Airship to Orbit" concept.

Atmospheric airships using both buoyancy and lift go from ground to 140K feet. There they dock with "Dark Sky Stations" where cargo is transferred to the massive airship-to-orbit craft that can only exist at this altitude and will use buoyancy to rise to 200K feet, then uses electric propulsion to speed up over several days to orbital velocity.

Here's the link I was talking about. We put a primitive airship up to 95k feet. It's no Hindenburg, but it worked and reached an altitude several miles higher than previously attained.

A little device to burst the balloon on command, how difficult can that be?

As it turns out, very difficult. The group I work for, JP Aerospace doesn't burst the balloon directly, but cuts it with a "cutoff" device (which Gordonjcp discusses in another reply). We had a working system up to a few years ago which depended on a particular pyrotechnic formulation. When the company no longer sent the formulation premixed, we spent something like a year attempting to remake that formulation, unfortunately, resulting in an unreliable cutoff. Now, we use a different approach which appears to be more reliable than our original approach.

If I read between the lines, they aren't even 100% sure it actually burst over Eastern Europe. It might as well be somewhere in Siberia or China. Or the Pacific.

It depends on what happened. Maybe they just lost contact with the vehicle at that point (which could be due to burst, batteries running out, or electronics failure). Maybe they have some data indicating the vehicle started to drop.

And it looks like a styrofoam box, and the alphabet used on it is not the cyrillic one, or Chinese, so a lot of people in the path of that balloon might not understand it. In addition, it looks like a piece of packaging material. Good luck finding it back.

You'd be surprised how many people mess with strange things that fall from the sky. :-) If they put contact information on the box and the box falls near a populated area, then there's a good chance someone will find and return it, possibly sans most of the electronics.

I ( and many others ) have been thinking about balloon assisted launch systems recently.

Balloons seem like an excellent and flexible launch element which could offer a ton of altitude and avoidance of at least some friction. Have you heard of or considered this?

Heh, I work with these guys. And needless to say, we put balloons up to 100k (including paying customers!) and occasionally launch small rockets at those altitudes.

I do like the concepts put out by JP Aerospace and their proposal to use airships and some interesting staging in order to get into orbit. It certainly is an innovative approach that if it works out could significantly reduce the cost of access to space by another order of magnitude or more and would make bulk cargo delivery of supplies from the Earth practical. Its only major drawback is that it takes days or weeks in order to get to orbit rather than a few minutes.... and for passenger delivery that might not be the best way to go other than for "steerage" passengers that have no other option available. For bulk goods like rocket fuel, that certainly wouldn't be a problem except for cryogenic issues and even that might have "acceptable losses".

Most of what you say is spot on, and I hope that eventually somebody will start to really work on these things with some real money behind the projects.

We've been flying experiments and payloads for students researcher to the edge of space for almost a decade. We've flown over 3,400 of them for nearly 10,000 students. A lot of the news articles about the new suborbital vehicle say out right that access to high altitude flight has never been done before. Experimenting where no experiments have gone before, well, except for experiments conducted by eight year olds. They put there experiments into ping pong balls and we fly them to 100,000 feet for free. We call them PongSats. People use them for everything from plant seeds for student inspiration all the way to university class research.The new guys go higher but the environment at 20 miles is basically the same as the one at 63 miles. Not everybody likes PongSats; I've had NASA officials tell me PongSats are of no importance because they are round and too small, big universities tell me PongSats aren't meaningfully because they are free. Yet none of that stops the thousand of researches using the program. All the new space planes and rockets are pretty cool. I just hope the scientists using them can catch up to the eight year olds. http://www.jpaerospace.com/ JP

I have to disagree with your statement that ARCA is doing something 'genuinely innovative' by using a balloon for the first stage. The concept is called a 'Rockoon' and was pioneered in the US in 1949 and has been used extensivly by JP Areospace, (among others), a small US company that has been working with balloons and rockets for over 30 years.

http://jpaerospace.com/rockoons.html

Yes, this is not only possible, but happening. I don't know about getting to the Moon, but getting into orbit is something that is actively being tried. One really cool video of a rocket getting launched off of a balloon can be found here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnq3r3tRVP0

This was launched by JP Aerospace and is the real thing, from a balloon flying at 10k feet. It was merely a demo flight to test the flight control hardware and to make sure that a rocket actually would launch... and in this case it was just an Estes rocket shoved in a tube when the flight computer remotely ignited the fuse to launch the rocket. The trick was to get the rocket to launch at all, not necessarily to go anywhere.

One other interesting group is the N-Prize that is offering a £10k prize for the first team to launch something into orbit for under £1000. What is really crazy is that there are several teams working on the idea, and that some of them are actually in the process of "bending metal" and trying to make it work. Even if it is just a ping-pong ball sent into orbit, that would be some kind of accomplishment to get a payload of that size to orbital velocities.

Yet another group using this approach is ARCA, and these guys are trying to get to the Moon. They are one of the original X-Prize teams that showed some real promise and have kept tweaking their rocket designs, with the latest attempts for getting to orbit using a very different kind of rocket staging system that you've simply got to see to believe. It pulls up each stage on a tether instead of pushing it up as a disintegrating pyramid.... presumably to develop economies of scale. They are doing most of their launches over the Black Sea, and is perhaps the one group using balloons that I think will get into orbit first.

Put a reflector lens on an aerostat at 140,000' a la http://www.jpaerospace.com/ and add a control system to the laser so it first sends a pilot beam at low power. The pilot beam is reflected back, and when the returned pilot beam is detected, only then can the laser go to full power. If the pilot beam is lost, chop the power, and start seeking where the aerostat went.

Power required is much less, the laser's on the ground so all you have to loft is the reflector/diffuser lens assembly, and solar cells with batteries on the aerostat allow it to keep station. An exclusion zone is required for aircraft so you don't blind pilots, but exclusion zones are a well accepted concept and pilots understand that already.

You could also put Arduino-controlled drones with variable-geometry wings on the aerostat. Drop them when the alert is given; wings unfold at optimum altitude, which uncover Stuka-like sirens powered by airflow. Use solid-fuel turbofans to propel them so the drones will have a long 'shelf life' and can loiter for hours as needed, and add a parachute for soft landing, recovery and reuse. Might as well turn cruise missiles into something useful...

If former New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin, a former telecom exec, could not figure out his satphones needed to be charged to work in the days before Katrina, well, what are the odds you'd get satphones charged in the 3rd world?

Instead, until http://www.jpaerospace.com/ perfects the aerostat station, build a series of Sky Pup-based http://skypup.wikispaces.com/ really cheap drones with Arduino-type autopilots http://diydrones.com/profiles/blog/show?id=705844:BlogPost:35640 and huge honkin' loudspeakers.

The Hawaii wing of the Civil Air Patrol uses manually-piloted Cessna 172s for the same mission, but Cessnas and pilot training are both spendy, whereas Sky Pups can be locally produced with minimal tools.

I don't understand what the obsession with going to Mars is.

Mars has ground. It's really that simple. Look at all of the things on Earth either built on the ground or made of stuff obtained from the ground. In comparison, there is nothing permanently in the sky on Earth. That situation would have to be reversed on Venus. You'd have to make almost everything out of the Venus atmosphere (that yields carbon, oxygen, sulfur, and nitrogen). Maybe you could run some sort of quick mining trips on the surface using balloons or harvest dust blown from the surface (it should be able to reach the 1 atmosphere platform). That might get you other materials like silicon, aluminum, and a bit of iron. Anything you can't get locally, you need to bring from elsewhere.

Don't get me wrong, I used to work for the only organization I know of (JP Aerospace) that has ever seriously proposed a permanent structure in the sky. Their "Dark Sky Station", which floats around 100 km high (at the very limits of the buoyant part of our atmosphere), is intended as a waystation for Airship to Orbit. If NASA did suddenly propose to colonize Venus, JP Aerospace would be well positioned to take advantage of that impulse.

But it's a very hard problem that probably won't be solved by the time Mars is colonized. I imagine Ceres, which has no atmosphere at all and a very weak 0.03 G gravity, would be colonized before Venus.

I don't understand what the obsession with going to Mars is.

Mars has ground. It's really that simple. Look at all of the things on Earth either built on the ground or made of stuff obtained from the ground. In comparison, there is nothing permanently in the sky on Earth. That situation would have to be reversed on Venus. You'd have to make almost everything out of the Venus atmosphere (that yields carbon, oxygen, sulfur, and nitrogen). Maybe you could run some sort of quick mining trips on the surface using balloons or harvest dust blown from the surface (it should be able to reach the 1 atmosphere platform). That might get you other materials like silicon, aluminum, and a bit of iron. Anything you can't get locally, you need to bring from elsewhere.

Don't get me wrong, I used to work for the only organization I know of (JP Aerospace) that has ever seriously proposed a permanent structure in the sky. Their "Dark Sky Station", which floats around 100 km high (at the very limits of the buoyant part of our atmosphere), is intended as a waystation for Airship to Orbit. If NASA did suddenly propose to colonize Venus, JP Aerospace would be well positioned to take advantage of that impulse.

But it's a very hard problem that probably won't be solved by the time Mars is colonized. I imagine Ceres, which has no atmosphere at all and a very weak 0.03 G gravity, would be colonized before Venus.

And I sent a chair up to 98,000 feet a few weekends ago. We launched three other chairs to above 90,000 feet that weekend. So where's this guy in the space chair arms race? Huh? Huh?

Seriously take a look at http://jpaerospace.com/ Basically since we started Space travel we've been into macho cowboys who suit up, rocket scientists, and massive flight control systems. Lets face it, the slow boat from Europe or the Middle East, or China still gets here, just a whole lot cheaper. These balloon cams one day is going to get people into space thinking.... What if we could remove about a good 90% of the thrust problem? What if?

There's a simple example. Earlier this summer I worked in Yellowstone National Park and had to help with an aerospace project in Black Rock Desert. I drove out of the park (about 120-150 miles) to Bozeman, Montana and flew to Denver, Colorado and then to Sacramento, California where the workshop was. We (I joined up with the rest of the group) then drove out to Reno and then Black Rock Desert (about 100 miles northeast of Reno). We rented a moving van and two SUVs for the project. Pickup trucks would have been better in my vieww, but nobody rents those out as far as I know.

After a couple of days of launching really lightweight chairs to the "edge of space" (see here and here for vague details), I returned via car to the Reno airport, flew to Denver and back to Bozeman. I then hopped in my car and drove back into the park. I think it was about 6-700 miles of driving and maybe 3-4,000 miles of flying. The travel time from my doorstep to Sacramento airport was something like 17 hours including some dead time in Bozeman and Denver. The other way was about as long to return.

Anyway, the car/airline synergy works really well for this scenario. Greyhound bus is pretty cheap (I'd say comparable to driving in cost per mile), but it'd take me a bit over a day to get to Sacramento from Bozeman (I think I'd go through Salt Lake City) and I would have still to drive to Bozeman (or perhaps Idaho Falls would be better). Train is no good. I believe I'd have to go through either Seattle or Chicago to get to Sacramento and Reno from Bozeman. And it'd be slow, much more than a day of travel.

Eyeballing a map of Europe, I suppose the first half of my trip would be a bit like starting in Birmingham, England, driving to Heathrow (with elk instead of London drivers), flying to say, Budapest, switching planes either in Berlin or Munich. I don't know anything about trains in Europe, but I bet there's some combination faster than 17 hours between Birmingham and Budapest even crossing so many country borders.

I believe you can, there's even a book about it from a respected scientist. http://www.amazon.com/dp/1894959736?tag=jpaer-20&camp=14573&creative=327641&linkCode=as1&creativeASIN=1894959736&adid=0DKZD44S4ZHFG34GQD5N& http://www.jpaerospace.com/

This reminds me a bit of JP Aerospace's airship-to-orbit concept.

in the U.S. sending payloads into "near space" on a fairly regular basis. It's much more common than most people would suspect. I've seen a rough estimate of ~1500 people in the U.S. who are involved with near space experimentation. It's very cool stuff and one of the few minimally regulated amateur sciences still available to those so inclined in the U.S.

An excellent primer is the Near Space Book: http://www.parallax.com/tabid/567/Default.aspx

Here are several links to active near space groups:

Treasure Valley Near Space Program: http://www.tvnsp.org/

Arizona Near Space Research: http://www.ansr.org/node/7

JP Aerospace: http://www.jpaerospace.com/

Most of these groups often need help with tracking and launching and at very least will share what they have learned with those interested.

Speaking of which, there is an airship to orbit concept that was discussed here a few years ago.

You have two airships, a ground ship and an orbital ship. You put your payload on the ground ship where it ferried to a high altitude rendezvous with the orbital airship. The orbital airship raises the payload farther, to the highest point it can on buoyancy. That point is far below orbit, but the atmosphere there would be thin enough to permit the use of ion thrusters. Ion engines take the airship to orbit: a two week process. To return payloads from orbit the process is reversed.

Personally, I don't think this would ever prove to be practical, but it is possible to imagine it working.

The outfit behind this concept (JP Aerospace seems to be a volunteer organization of high altitude balloon enthusiasts. They've done a number of spectacular balloon missions, in one case sending a balloon to over 19 miles, or 1/3 of the way to the official "space" line. They don't seem to have done anything in the last year though.

That may involve, for example, three signatures just to confirm that J345 is plugged into P345 (and not into P346 which is of the same type and only 1" to the left.)

You start with a failed example. There should be no way to plug J345 into P346. Even with a sledgehammer. Three signatures is not enough.

I personally believe that we are witnessing the apex of the rocket-driven space program.

No, there is one final ingredient that is missing. Launch frequency. First, a higher launch rate means you divide up the fixed costs among more flights. Second, the more rockets you make the more you learn about making and operating them cheaper. A rule of thumb I've heard in such cases is a doubling of quantity of the good produced results in 10% to 20% reduction with each doubling of the average cost of the good. I assume it'd work similarly for the service side of providing a launch vehicle.

Once you have a high launch frequency, and SpaceX has the potential to achieve that. Then you can build the demand to support larger rockets and reusable launch vehicles, the next step after rockets.

Also, as pointed out by Teancum in his reply, propellant isn't a big component of launch vehicle cost.

For example, one SciFi writer offered lighter than air balloons which first rise in the atmosphere, and then morph into jet engines, using the gas to get to an LEO.

Please, please, do you recall who this is? I work with JP Aerospace, and we'd love to know who this author is. I'm assuming that my coworkers don't already know. But given that I haven't heard of it, it's likely they haven't either.

This group is trying the next step from that - they want to use a balloon to rapidly accelerate to the edge of the atmosphere and passing beyond (like a whale jumping from sea).

http://www.jpaerospace.com/ascender175.html/

There are people working on using airships (balloons) to get to orbit more cheaply...

http://www.jpaerospace.com/

Well, if you have a 50 quid budget, that's like 500 US dollars, so just put a GPS and camera in it, and voila, you can become part of the growing and popular hobby of sending your payload into space on a baloon:

http://www.qsl.net/w5sjz/ntxballoonproject.htm
http://www.jpaerospace.com/

Plus hundreds of other links . . .

...may be expensive but if you can fit the electronics inside of a ping pong ball you can at least get it close for free.

Space can be cheap too --- Airship to Orbit.

The fact that a privately funded hobby group is very actively beavering away at it (doing it, not just talking) shows pretty well that Space can be cheap, as long as you're not tied to preconceived ideas and tied down by huge vested interests.

If this were government-funded, we'd be in space for next to nothing in just a handful of years. NASA and ESA have some of the needed ion engine technology already, and recent developments have increased the available power by leaps and bounds.

Space isn't inherently expensive, unless you want to get 2+ million Kg of metal up there in minutes. Which is a pretty silly thing to want to do, you know.

Space travel is a temporary situation. It will cost too much and become unfeasible in the next 50 - 100 years.

You have that back to front. The current difficulty of doing space travel is temporary, because it is the result of poor strength of materials and poor energy usage.

Materials technology is improving at an extraordinary pace, and there is now a whole industry dedicated to manufacturing nanotubes of one form or another, despite this being only the beginning of work on nanoscale materials. Much greater things are on the way. And with stronger, lighter materials you can build much better space-worthy craft, not only hugely safer in the hostile medium but also able to withstand greater dynamic forces more safely. And more cheaply!

Then we come to energy. Contrary to the daily propaganda of environmentalists, there is no shortage of energy on the planet --- the surface of the Earth receives about 150 thousand times more energy from the sun than mankind is forecast to need by the year 2020. Our "energy problems" simply reflect our poor ability to harness that near-zero-cost energy, currently.

But that can change, especially in the context of space flight.

For a start, we can rise up through the bulk of the atmosphere almost without any energy cost at all, and many outfits are already experimenting with that, to the very edge of space.

And secondly, once up there, solar energy is freely available, and as long as there is still residual atmosphere around you, this gives you matter which you can use for propulsion, slowly building up speed as you skip through the upper layers. A relatively small amount of extra reaction mass is needed to boost the orbit out the final few dozen miles once you have close to orbital speed.

In due course then, on materials and energy grounds there is every reason to forecast a very bright and buoyant future for space travel. NASA-type costs are not required, as long as you're not in a hurry.

I used to know a guy in Blue Operations, the Bezos funded space venture run by Sci-fi guy Neal Stevenson. They were exploring ideas for cheap space launches, and one of them was a floating high altitude lighter than air lifted launch platform.

Seems like a perfect match to supply the inflatable stations.

A few comments/corrections:

* It's Blue Origin, not Blue Operations

* I'm pretty sure the company isn't run by Neal Stephenson, he's just an employee/consultant

* I hadn't heard of Blue Origin pursuing airship-to-orbit ideas, but this is something that JP Aerospace has been working on

Yeah they're a thing of the past, the future is getting into space, oh hang on:
http://www.jpaerospace.com/

Instead of a mass driver, checkout the idea that these people have. Using ion thrusters to drive a lighter than air (at some altitude) airfoil/ballon to LEO. http://www.jpaerospace.com/

That's precisely the plan of these guys.

The other thing I don't understand about this whole scheme is why the whole weight of the thing has to be supported from orbit!

Airships are a fairly safe and established technology. some companies (http://www.jpaerospace.com/) are looking at building airships to orbit.
So why not combine the technologies?
i.e. build a platform which will support the weight of the cable below it. I imagine something like a huge balloon in a torus shape with the cable going through the middle of it. Let's say you space these every mile or so up and that each station supports the weight of the mile of cable.
Now the last i heard the best they've managed so far is about 19 miles up. Now this may be a long way off the 120 miles of low earth orbit that they're aiming for, but if you can take a sizable chunk of the weight off the problem then it surely can't hurt. If they're sucessful in making a balloon that can go to LEO, then why bother with building the 22,000 miles of space elevator to go to GEO?
Ok because even once you get to that height you've not got enough energy to actually be in orbit, you'd then separately have to accelerate - still this might be a way to incrementally get to orbit cheaper?

It's not quite orbit (yet), but JP Aerospace has been running a PongSat program for the past few years which does something similar. Some of their past missions have gone above 100,000 feet, and would make great science fair projects for students. The description from their page:

A PongSat is an experiment that fits inside of a ping pong ball.

These ping pong ball 'satellites' are flown to the edge of space by balloon or launched in sounding rockets. The PongSats are then returned to the student.

It's an easy and inexpensive way to get students excited about science and engineering.

There are endless possibilities for experiments that can fit inside a ping pong ball. PongSat's can be as simple or complex as you want them to be. Experiments can be as simple as comparing how high a ball bounces before and after being exposed to vacuum. The PongSat can carry seeds to see if exposure to cosmic rays effect their growth. Several small inexpensive computers and other electronics can fit inside a PongSat. These can be used to create a wide range of experiments. Whether carrying a marshmallow to see if it puffs up in the vacuum of near space or an entire sophisticated satellite in miniature, PongSat can create motivation, drive
and passion in the classroom.

PongSats are flown at no cost to the student or school.

If you simply want to get cheap payload into orbit this decade using materials that are NOT theoretical, find a way to get funding to the blimp-to-orbit people at JP Aerospace.

Lots of things wrong with the Space Elevator concept... it breaking could kill a lot of people... but the dealkiller is that you can't build a structure with theoretical materials, and it shouldn't take a "rocket scientist" to figure this out.

I for one do feel somewhat cheated by the lack of real manned space exploration in the last 25 years. I am one of those guys who used to read Heinlein and Clarke back when it was not popular to do so (we're talking about ancient history here). However, I'm still optimistic about the future. While we haven't been sending any people to explore the Moon or Mars (or other destinations), the technology we need for practical human colonies on the Moon or Mars has been developing and is just around the corner (told you I was an optimist). Materials science is coming up with remarkable advances monthly. Computer capability is advancing daily. Robotics, genomics, data mining, space propulsion, etc., etc. Nanotechnology promises to bring about disruptive breakthroughs in all of these areas within 10 years. These days if you don't read about a major breakthrough in some tech area daily, it's a slow news day.

I think it's right for business to get into the business of near Earth space exploration. Real competition between businesses will produce advances. And business competition will be paid for by those who have money, instead of tax dollars that could be better spent solving some of our real problems on this planet. What we need is a framework for that competition (government regulation or the lack of, tax incentives, public discussion, etc.). NASA should concentrate on away-from-Earth space and on developing new technology, or in other words those things that are too risky for business to tackle.

Just for fun, here's a link to one of my favorite (but weird) space launch development efforts.

There are people doing just this, except not with a hot air balloon, but rather a lighter than air craft:

http://www.jpaerospace.com/atohandout.pdf/

I like this idea since it uses fairly simple technology. Although it would take a relatively long time to get to orbit using an ion engine(about a week), you could put cargo on airships, and people on rockets.

Another nice thing about going slowly is that you don't have to manage all the risks of volatile fuels on the way up, and a rapid reentry on the way down.

And when the cable is ready, do the space elevator.