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Around the World In 14 Days
An anonymous reader writes: "Adventurer Steve Fossett succeeded Tuesday on his sixth try to pilot a balloon solo around the world, crossing the meridian where he started his historic journey June 19, his ground crew at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, announced. Here is the official site, while there's also several other articles, including this one."
Now we don't have to hear about him trying and failing anymore!
...if he had just gone to the Antarctica and walked around in a circle?
I'm not trying to be a jerk, but look at the polar view of his flightpath. He's not near the equator, and he never crosses it. It looks more like a circumnavigation of Antarctica than a circumnavigation of the globe. It only looks like a circumnavigation of the globe if you use the 'flat' map, and only because it smears Antartica out.
Silver only because he went around an easy part of the world, basically he mostly just circled Antarctica. Heck, you could go to the south pole and walk in a circle and say you've been around the world ;) But still its not a small feat and I congradulate him on it. It would have been a gold star for making it around a lot closer to the equator but then I can understand why he gave up on that, what with countries like China and such refusing to let him cross their airspace...
--Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop. - Dr. Walter Gibbs
What's the point? Those ballooners have blown millions of dollars to do this. Why? Plus, as a previous poster pointed out, did he really go around the globe? I say they should have to cross the equator once on each side of the earth, say within a 1000 mile buffer zone.
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
Not a great circle, but about 17% shorter.
"Adventurer Steve Fossett"? This must be the first report I've seen in years that didn't say "Multi-Millionaire Steve Fossett". I had become convinced that Steve was his middle name.
Piloting a balloon solo around the world. That is incredible---if this was 1899!! :)
Brian Ellenberger
In other news, Bud Light Scientists recently announced they were nearing the end of their ground breaking high altitude sleep deprivation beer party study.
Branson never attempted the flight solo. He was pipped on the circumnavigation by some other team, and Fosset then went alone to become the first to do it solo.
Official rules as to what constitutes a flight which is a real circumnavigation are on the site, it has to be between the two 30 degree meridiens basically... in any case it will not be ratified until some weeks have passed.
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
The Earth is about 24,000 miles around, and he's about 8,000 miles short of that. Obviously, as you said, if he had gone on a 15-minute 1-mile trip around the South Pole, nobody would have considered it a round-the-world trip. At what point does it count?
Sure, he set a record for the longest distance solo flight, I'll give him that.
That you have to survive the landing for 48 hours, something that Fosset has thus far not demonstrated.
There was joke going around during the construction of Rutan's Voyager round-the-world-nonstop-nonrefueled plane, back in the mid 80's. Nothing was spared to reduce weight on that project, because every pound of additional structure required six or seven pounds of additional fuel, requiring more structure, and so on. Unfortunately, that philosophy turned the cockpit into a bit of a hellhole. The saying was, though, that any more than 48 hours of survival was excess design capacity; unneeded for the record attempt.
thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
Man with too much money has finally accomplished a completely useless feat after only 5 previous attempts to do so.
What a great day for humanity.
I'm tired of hearing about these people that have more money than one human being needs. This guy and others (Bill Gates) have enough money to change the world if they wanted to. Why dont they put their money to some good use rather than stupid crap like this. They could change a small country that is dying off due to starvation or lack of water but what do they spend their money on. Balloons. I can understand wanting to do all these things just to say you did it, but I would feel horrible about myself knowing that I have that much money and I am flaunting it around while children are dying all over the world.
I bet it would be much easier to cross back onto the meridian from where you started near a pole. I'm sure its colder, but its cold up there anyhow.
It was really hairy during the bullfight, not to mention when they rescued the princess! Congratulations on a job well done!
;)
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
Don't you think that Mr. Fossett has endured enough without the criticism being heaped upon him by the Slashdot crowd.
You have no idea how stressful and agonizing it is being a millionaire dilettante, having to indulge yourself constantly with testosterone and ego-enhancing 'sports' like yachting and ballooning.
Feel his pain.
It appears that the rules for balloon flights are established by The Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI):
http://www.fai.org/ballooning/rtw2-98.asp
There's lots of interesting info on their website at http://www.fai.org/
It's a good read, if for no other reason than gaining the ability to drop "homologation" into your next conversation.
When you have nothing left to burn you must set yourself on fire
Or whoever knows about wind patterns... I read this book in high school, don't remember the name off hand but basically there's a nuclear war in the northern hemisphere. Everyone up here dies. Everyone in Australia is flipping out, because slowly the radiation seems down and kills all of them too. (Is it called _On the Beach_?) Anyways, the point being, winds DONT occur for like a 40 mile band on the equator right? IF this is true, then a balloonist would not be able to cross the equator, no?
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
Jeez, this guy spent I don't know how many years of his life, and millions of dollars, trying to reach this goal. How is the science logo appropriate for that? Is there an artist out there who could whip up a good looking balloon icon?
It's the least we can (collectively, I'm no artist) do.
They didn't even say what his class was!
And Look! What kind of Bio is this for an "adventurer":
Fossett's other adventures have including swimming the English Channel, piloting a dog sled in the Iditarod race in Alaska, driving in the LeMans auto endurance race in France and finishing the Ironman Triathlon in Hawaii.
I see no Dragons! No Kobolds! Not even a little steenking goblin.
Heh, some adventurer he is.
-GiH
Come here, that I might BRAIN thee!
didn't francis drake circumcise the world with a 30-foot clipper?
According to a story on CNN.com He's done a whole lot of other impressive stuff too.
To quote;
"Fossett's other adventures have including swimming the English Channel, piloting a dog sled in the Iditarod race in Alaska, driving in the LeMans auto endurance race in France and finishing the Ironman Triathlon in Hawaii."
"The Living Earth® image is a highly accurate composite of multiple high-resolution satellite images that has been color-enhanced to appear natural to the human eye. "
I hate this kind of crap talk : it's stressing totally silly, useless details, buzwords and nonsense. A Black and white map with only the outline of the continents would have been just as clear.
And who says they didn't just scan it from a stupid $10 atlas from one of their kids ?
BAH
Even when he's having fun, a millionaire can't stop blabbering peptalk. Doesn't anyone else feel like puking on his fucking balloon ?
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
Ground crew. People who made the balloon, equipment, and supplies.
It's like the space program -- people act as if the money is just shot into space and lost. It wasn't -- it is spent on the designers, builders, support crew.
Whether or not those people should have considered getting "real" jobs is another question which you seem to know the answer to. I personally would rather they got it than some jacknape too lazy to get off his ass and look for a job. And if it comes down to a spacecraft or balloon engineer or ground crew, vs someone equally deserving in some other country, I'd just as soon it went to the locals.
Infuriate left and right
So, this guy is from Chicago. You can't imagine the amount of press coverage it has gotten here.
I feel for you, pal. I don't live anywhere near Chicago and I've already heard way too fucking much about this.
Most mass media outlets are billing this as one of the major stories of the day. Why? Does anyone really give a shit? I mean really, really care? How many of us really care about ballooning? How many of us know anything about ballooning? Why is this a major news story?
I hear a lot of people complaning that this guy should have used his money to help needy causes rather than attempt this record. I understand this frustration and disgust. However, it is his money after all and he's entitled to spend it however he likes. The thing that galls me is that the media fawns over him like he's accomplished some monumental achievement on behalf of the human race. Yeah, yeah, it's a record. So what? I don't hate this millionare. I hate the media for hyping him up as some kind of hero or celebrity.
The super rich will always find ways to amuse themselves with their money. That's fine. So why the hell is this a news story?
GMD
watch this
AFAIK, it's always been "Wash-u" here in St. Louis. I guess this story has opened that particular abbreviation to the rest of the world. :)
For people not involved with FAI records: there are several classes based on aircraft type, engine type, task etc. A record would look something like "production single-engine land monoplane, less than 200 HP, fastest flight over a distance of 500 miles."
Unlimited growth == Cancer.
Unlimited growth == Cancer.
Judging on the pic of the map I'd hardly call this "around the world". A person could walk in a 10 foot wide circle and cross all longitudes too. This just doen't seem to be that great a deal to me. If he followed the equator or something like that, sure, then I'd call that a DAMN big deal, but this is kinda minor IMHO...
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
Well, it depends on what you're talking about...
It is well-known that near the equator and near the surface, the winds are generally light. But there is what's called the "Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone", an area of convergent winds. You can see that on a satellite picture of the western Pacific (look at the bottom edge, near the equator, obviously...). The latitude of this zone varies by season, moving always toward the summer hemisphere. It is an important component in what is called the "Hadley cell", which is an important circulation since it carries a great deal of heat from the tropics to the mid-latitudes and helps explain the placement of the major deserts. A good discussion of the very general "General Circulation of Earth's Atmosphere" can be found here, however some of the more interesting "facts" in it are currently in debate (for example, the existence of the Ferrel cell... the Hadley cell is definitely there, though).
So, the tropics aren't totally wind-free and are actually quite important to what happens through the rest of the world. I believe that it's been calculated that the average residence time of an air parcel in any one hemisphere is about 2 to 4 years, meaning that most parcels travel between hemispheres decently frequently.
Other factors to include is what's called the "Quasi-Biennial Oscillation" or QBO. This is strictly a lower stratospheric phenomenon (30 hPa is a pressure with sea level around 1000 hPa... 30 hPa is somewhere around 30 km above sea level.)
For some info on the QBO, check out:
http://www.atmos.ucla.edu/~cwhung/qbo.html
http://tao.atmos.washington.edu/data_sets/qbo/
Hope this helps. In short, a balloonist could be able to cross the equator. But you'd want to avoid it since the equator is normally pretty stormy.
-Jellisky
A circumnavigation is anything where latitude is between -60 and + 60 degrees. (i.e. at least 30 degreees from the poles) with allowances for brief transgressions as he did in the south Atlantic.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
Millionaire pounds "me first" record into submission. A world yawns...
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
This is NOT an "orbit" of the earth. Skimming around the edge of Antarctica is NOT an orbit of the earth. It's like the guys who work at the south pole, there's a marker to indicate the true geographic pole, you can walk around it and claim you orbited the earth in a few seconds. I'll save my praise for someone who orbits around the equator, like Dick Rutan and Jeana Yaeger did.
He is about 6k miles short. He went around the southern hemishere, but not around the world.
If he did then, he should have went a shorter route, like once around the south pole at the 89 degree mark.
please, this guy didn't fly "around the world". He flew a circle around the south poll. There's a pretty big diffrence.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
"He's going to try to put down some place safe. A safe landing is the key to everything right now," says the Sydney Morning Herald
The print version of the story goes on to describe a safe landing was a large open area, dotted with a few trees to avoid dragging him around.
The catch ? He was planning on flying over the Nullarbor plain in Western Australia. Nullarbor is not Australain Aboriginal - it means "No Trees" in Latin for obvious reasons.
So they are going to skip that, stay south and will probably hit South Australia in a couple of hours, continuing to clock up the miles.