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Make Your Own Cluster Balloon
Mr. Christmas Lights writes "'Have you ever dreamed of being carried into the sky by a giant bouquet of colorful toy balloons?' John Ninomiya does exactly that using 50-150 four-seven foot diameter balloons filled with helium ... and sealed with tape (duct?) and cable ties. Folks may recall the lawn chair man who floated up to 16,000 feet, but John takes this to a whole new level and his site has some wild pictures ... and includes the comment 'Kids, don't try this at home!'"
have difficulty reading "50-150 four-seven foot diameter balloons" Try this: 50 to 150 4' by 7' diameter balloons.
"I'm not talking to myself, I'm just the only one who's listening." - Jimmies Chicken Shack
The lawn-chair man sounded like a hoax to me, but snopes.com (which we all know is the final word in urban legends) claims it's true!
My favorite part:
As Larry and his lawnchair drifted into the approach path to Long Beach Municipal Airport, perplexed pilots from two passing Delta and TWA airliners alerted air traffic controllers about what appeared to be an unprotected man floating through the sky in a chair.
The Online Slang Dictionary
*cough* Quote from the article: "The balloons range in size from four to seven feet; depending on the mix of sizes, anywhere from 50 to 150 balloons may be needed."
Physics makes the world go 'round.
Please use one of the following mirrors:
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f 9f692d3cdf2/index.html Mirror Dot
http://www.clusterballoon.org.nyud.net:8090/intro
http://mirrordot.org/stories/be656bccec5ae60c9862
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Check out Danny Deckchair. Its relativly new, and recieved decent reviews.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0337960/
From http://dsc.discovery.com/fansites/mythbusters/epi
They tried doing this, and let's just say it took a LOT of balloons to get a young girl even neutrally buoyant.
Yes. Most of the world's helium comes from a bubble in an oil well in Texas. Once it is released it drifts off into space.
Oh my god!
This is the most magical thing I have seen in quite some time.
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
The problem with jumping off a burning building isn't so much slowing down, but jumping far enough away from the building to avoid hitting it. This is similar to what base-jumpers face, as you're floating down a cross-wind can catch you and slam you back into the structure.
I suppose you could keep a base-jumping chute in your 30th floor apartment/office and worse comes to worse, give it a try. But I imagine a cluster of helium ballons would be so bulky, you'll never be able to jump far enough from the building to avoid hitting it. I'd say best bet: strap on a base-jumping chute and sit on man-size slingshot that'll propel you up and far enough from the building to make the descent relatively safe.
"There is only so much left in the strategic reserves."
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There is enough helium in the US reserves to supply the states for 100 years, or the world for 10. I don't think this guy made a dent.
http://www.agiweb.org/gap/legis104/heliumup.htm
Uh, a hellfire is an anti-tank air to ground missile. Not that useful for downing a floating lawnchair. Stinger missiles (shoulder launched ground to air) might work though.
Q.
From the Site:
Latex balloon clusters have been flown as high as 20,000 feet; however, for a recreational flight, a maximum altitude of 3,000 - 5,000 feet is more common.
From a BASE Jump site:
The safety margin in a normal free fall exercise is 800 metres (~2600 feet), the minimum height at which a jumper may deploy the chute safely
So basically if something farks up, your really farked.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Yes, it floats off into space. Where did you think it went? It's lighter than molecular O2 and N2. If you don't believe me, check the wikkipedia or google for "strategic helium reserve". I weld with the stuff and I breath the stuff when I dive shipwrecks with a closed-circuit rebreather. I have a vested interest in knowing.
I think your calculations were wrong. I remember the original event, it was all over the TV news. Also, sounding baloons are launched routinely. They rise until their expansion causes their weight to equal that of the air that they displace. They then tend to hover at that altitude until the helium leaks out.
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Well, a hellfire could work, but you'd probably be blinded by the laser designator before you got hit (well, unless it were a TV, infrared, or radar guided hellfire that is.) I've heard of a few helis being downed by hellfires, doubt a bunch of balloons would pose much of a challenge :)
Chances that's what would be used to shoot you down? About negative zero percent. Much cheaper to use the 20mm guns. Like shooting monkeys suspended from balloons!
Crazily enough...
we *mine* helium.
Most of it comes from natural gas wells, where it is trapped underground.
Yes, I know that is incredibly bizarre, but it is also true.
A one meter/three foot balloon has 27 times the lift of a 33 cm/one foot balloon, etc.
Go here to get the full skinny on the REAL lawn chair pilot, complete with streaming audio, pictures, maps, the works.
It was on Art Bell a few years ago....
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium:
"...the concentration of helium in the Earth's atmosphere is only 1 part in 200,000, largely because most helium in the Earth's atmosphere escapes into space due to its inertness and low mass."
They're only flying as high as about 20,000 feet at the most. The pressure up there is about 500 mb. Sea level pressure is approximately 1000 mb. Consider an experiment at the surface where we inflate a balloon in a 1000 mb environment. We then keep the same temperature, but drop the pressure to 500 mb. That means for the balloon to maintain equal pressure with its surroundings, it must double in volume. That means, since volume is a three dimensional quantity that the diameter must increase by the cube root of 2. The diameter is only 1.26 times what it was before. Even at 125 mb, the balloon would only be twice its previous size.
The 300 mb level in the atmosphere is around 32,000 feet. That's higher than the peak of Mt. Everest. Unless you brought oxygen tanks along, you would almost certainly be unconscious at that pressure. And yet in our surface experiement, at 300 mb, the balloon would only have a diameter of 1.49 times its diameter at 1000 mb.
And if your balloon is still intact at 300 mb and you're still conscious, you'd have more to worry about than your balloon bursting. You're likely to encounter some pretty strong winds at that altitude which might make steering a bit of a challenge.
But unless you fill your balloon almost completely full at the surface, you'd likely be unconscious before you'd see your balloon burst.
Helium has utility in places where you'd never think about- heliarc welding, or any inert gas welding (TIG, MIG, etc.), for example. Welding aluminum isn't the same without it. Liquid fuel rocketry uses it to drive the fuel. It has innumerable cryogenic applications that are irreproducible with any other element. You can't grow silicon or germanium crystals without it, so kiss your computer chips and cell phones goodbye without it. The tests used to throw sizable chunks of foam into a Shuttle wing to simulate what happened to Columbia were done with a light gas gun- which uses helium to create a shock wave of sufficient velocity.
Everyone thinks it's a big joke, a "strategic helium reserve." Truth be known, were it not for the eccentric and vast natural gas fields of west Texas that have very high concentrations of helium, we'd be up shit's creek without a pooper scooper on this one. Fact is, we can lord over other countries that require helium for their own purposes.
Supplies are finite, and we're pissing it away on toy balloons. What a waste. Let 'em use hydrogen instead. Maybe they can do a Hindenburg. How's that for substituting for helium?
Commercial quantities of helium come out of the ground in Texas. People think the Strategic Helium Reserve was such a big joke. Except for the fact that without helium, we can't make computer chips, can't do inert gas welding, can't do a lot of science and (most important) can't make squeaky voices at kid's parties. So, the government has decided it's in the best interests of all to privatize the collection, storage, and the distribution network for what is a non-renewable, economically critical element.
Even Wired magazine has mentioned the potential helium shortage. We'll run out eventually. The American Chemical Society puts it at around 2015. That's not good. The spring of 2002, there was enough of a shortage that the distributors of air products had to clamp down on helium- there was rationing for a few months. And the government's concept is to *privatize* it. Wonderful.
wrong. a) if you want velocities that slow, for most of your flight you're gonna be going even slower than your landing so ignore drag for now. You need to figure out the size of the balloon to provide a force resisting gravity for your dude. Helium will give a lift of something like 1.13 kg/m^3 around sea level at stp (iirc, my little bro asked me when he was building a balloon). So do some math, what radius gives you (1.13)(4/3)pi*r^3=100? Something around 2.5 I guess. If your radius is much bigger than 2.5 meters you'll float away. Now, if you get down to say 1.3 meters, where (again just by estimating) you'd have like half the bouyancy force, you're still talking about high impact speeds. You need to get pretty close to neutral weight if you wanna not hit hard. 1m/s is pretty slow, you can handle an impact of maybe 7m/s without broken bones too much, that's the highest I've fallen from. But 12m/s is the point where the fall is more likely fatal than not, a height of about 7m.
Anyway to summarize, you need to get down to a speed where drag force is negligable so ignore that. You need a balloon radius that gets your effective weight pretty close to 0, then go a little smaller but not too much. You get an upper limit on size by solving (1.13)(4/3)pi*r^3=mass, and the balloon size will be between 2 and 3 meters.
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