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More on High-Altitude Balloonists
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.
"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?
Apple iProduct. Non importa cosa sia, lo comprerete!
As the balloon rises the atmosphere gets less dense, hence it rises slower. This is why the balloon is so large to enable _some_ lift at 25 miles. This is still not high enought for satellites which are in the 00s of miles altitude.
So it can't replace the shuttle or rockets.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
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, 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 delicate.
I really have no clue why they wouldn't order their balloon from the same place most people interested in this sort of thing do, Raven Industries. Maybe they didnt have the dough. We don't fly people on our balloons, just huge science payloads in the range of 5-7000 pounds. I wish these guys the best, but I really beleive they are insane.
StickMan
www.rageagainst.net
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 "seems" wrong now....