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NASA Launches Largest Single-Cell Balloon
hohosforbreakfast writes "According to CNN, NASA launched the largest single-cell, fully-sealed balloon ever from Australia. This thing is supposed to be as large as a football (American) stadium once it's fully inflated, and flies 20 miles high. It'll circumnavigate the globe and then be landed by remote control in Australia. It looks like this flight is a proof-of-concept, but more flights, lasting 100 days each, are planned. Looks like an interesting alternative to satellites for certain observations. The official site is here."
February 24, 2001
SYDNEY, Australia (AP) -- A giant balloon, which scientists hope will usher in a new age of near space research by riding on the edge of the Earth's atmosphere, took off Sunday after a two-month delay.
"Everybody's a bit relieved," said Garry Woods, the acting launch station director.
Especially relieved was the crew of technicians, 400 strong, who could finally relax.
"We had quite a time of it," said Binky, the team director. "There was a lot of controversy at first, as to what shape the giant balloon would be in. Garry was originally inclined to go with a weiner dog, because he thought it would be most aerodynamic. But we managed to talk him out of. He just didn't understand at first that that particular balloon animal simply didn't scale well. Giggles was the one that had the bright idea of suggesting the ellipse shape, which everyone seemed to like."
Before the clowns finally hopped into their tiny car the launch site, the were nice enough to stop to answer a few questions. Asked what was the hardest part of the process, a short, green wigged clown smoking a cigarette stated simply: "blowing the goddamn thing up. I need a beer."
NASA doesn't leave the balloon material in the wild. The balloons as they fall are tracked and recovered. NASA takes immense precautions when it comes to impacting both human life and wildlife. Please note that I'm being very serious about this, and not joking nor quoting some propaganda - having worked on a ballooning project, I know that the mission priorities come second to both human life and environmental impact. This is extremely frustrating sometimes, especially when you hope to get 40 hours at float, but, it's a good policy.
As an example, have you ever seen a scientific balloon up? Not unless you live in a few select areas of the country - ones with immense wide open spaces where a balloon's descent can be controlled accurately (New Mexico is one of them - Fort Sumner, to be specific). The instrument has to be recovered (you want it to fly again, after all) and so you recover both it and the balloon.
There's no danger to wildlife in this case. That factor has already been considered.
...Must come down. And it already has. I just heard on the evening news that it was brought down by remote control after it developed a leak.
"Go into the hall of mirrors and have a bloody hard look at yourself" - HG Nelson
Yah. It's a really sad thing to hear, but this is the way balloon experiments go sometimes. It's also not a big concern, as well, since so long as you don't lose the payload, it's easy to just launch another balloon. Of course, the cost is upsetting, but it's acceptable in proof-of-concept flights.
Best of luck to the team - I hope their rapid "up-down" flight goes as good as ours did! Hope the payload's okay - and good luck on the next flight.
(Oh, and don't doubt that some of the members might be reading Slashdot even as this happens. Considering all you can really do sometimes is wait for approval, etc., there really isn't anything else to do.)
The balloon isn't an alternative to commercial satellites - it's an alternative to scientific satellites.
It's cheap and effectively gets you out of the atmosphere. That's all you need for scientific experiments.
Plenty of science has actually already been done on balloons, and plenty of traditional science is migrating to balloons because of the cost advantage. Telescopes, for instance, are excellent candidates for balloon flights, if you can work out a few kinks here and there (pointing). The main disadvantage had been the float time - measured in hours previously. The ULDB will eliminate that disadvantage, and hopefully, ULDBs will start replacing many satellite missions which could have functioned fine on balloons.
According to the real time tracking page at the site, the flight was terminated shortly after launch.
Shut up and eat your vegetables!!!
Was the failure due to a NASA mixup over US football stadium units of measurement vs. Aussie rules football stadium units? ;-)