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NASA's Space Balloon Smashes Car In Australia
Humunculus writes "Of more worldly issues, NASA's latest multimillion-dollar stratosphere-bound balloon launch has gone horribly wrong and crashed into a car, turning it over and narrowly missing two elderly people who were observing the launch. The payload fared worse, reportedly being smashed into a 'thousand pieces.'"
First splat
what is the probability of a car to hitting something from space?
Is not like the surface of the earth is covered in cars. It can be intentional.
-Woof woof woof!
The director of the Balloon Launching Centre, Professor Ravi Sood, says no one was hurt. But he says the scientists involved in the NASA-sponsored project are crushed.
It says right there, some NASA scientists were crushed in the accident.
I think the old couple needs to sue, sell chunks of their car on eBay, and retire rich!
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
that Australia is upside down
"whack-a-car! We're rollin' in taxpayer's money already. We might as well have some fun..." - Anonymous NASA scientist
That was by far the most fascinating headline I've seen on Slashdot in many a day.
The lead baloon engineer, known for his cocky attitude and general air of superiority, had his ego severely deflated.
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Throw another balloon on the barbie before the dingo eats my payload. Ha ha!
I think we should respond to this by drinking Fosters. We should also honor our ancestors by stealing from tourists.
Australia is #!!
He said the balloon was then seen lying partially-inflated above a paddock "like a white Uluru".
what's a paddock?
and what is with the reference to an albino version of a star trek character?
i know you australians typically speak german like your neighbors to the north, but if you are going to write a story in the american language, try to more precise
thanks
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I know we lost, what I assume is, millions. (Probably $150 per screw) Someone's car got smashed. We almost killed people. We probably set the program back X amount of time. X amount of time is going to cost, what I assume is, millions. But still...
We laugh at Fail Blog so...can't we laugh at this a little? Or maybe at least chuckle?
I'll try anything once. Twice if it tastes good
After watching the video, I can't help but think there was a massive miscalculation of the lift. And ignorance of real launch conditions, consisting of a mild breeze.
Keep Doing Good.
Why did you think a big balloon would stop people?
I asked my spaceship to compute the probability of this happening and the Improbability Drive (TM) kicked in, launching me to the restaurant at the end of the Universe.
It seems in the very beginning of the clip that there was not enough upward force on the cable for a proper lift off. The launch release caused the payload to immediately swing like a pendulum and there was not enough launch height for the amount of vertical lift being applied to avoid the payload swinging into the ground.
I'm assuming that the actual near vertical crash was due to some kind of abort procedure initiated as a result of the payload being dragged across the ground because there was an (off screen) catastrophic balloon failure at that point.
freud, schwarzenegger, mozart, schrodinger...
ok, that's respectable
respect to you australians then
but you really should stick with your native german language
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Australian Couple: "What was that?"
NASA: "That would be telling."
Is this piece of junk costing NASA millions?
Or is the R&D costing millions and does this thing itself cost a lot less to reproduce?
Just a minor question, of course...
Here be signatures
I remember when NASA could sling shot a satellite 40,000+ miles looping around a planet 32 times, ricochet of an asteroid and drop a golf ball in a cup of coffee in the middle of Denver blindfolded with both hands behind their back.
Now they can't remember to convert metric to imperial (and back again) and can't launch a ballon...
Damn NASA used to be the best and the brightest. I worry if we'll be able to feed ourselves by the end of the year :P
NASA's performance was once the measure of the USA's intellectual success... I'm worried... apparently more money on education doesn't = smarter people...
I mean come on it's not rocke...errr wait...
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
How do you crash a balloon? I mean, don't you just fill it up with helium and let it go? Then it comes down slowly in a few days, right?
Right?
...it blends !!!!!
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
....I bet they claim the balloon is actually a crashed alien spaceship...
Was there a little boy in it? Is he OK??
If it isn't broke, tinker with it till it is!
Please assume it was an alien ship this time.
I think we just explained UFO sightings....
Bryan
austria before world war ii was known as the empire of austria-hungry
this was solved by the invasion of turkey
turkey is a delicious country, especially on thanksgiving day, which is the day turkey was able to remove the hungry part of the austro-hungryian empire
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
You need to brush up a bit on your geography if you can't tell the difference between Austria and Australia.
..manage to crash their cars into the strangest things.
He said the balloon was then seen lying partially-inflated above a paddock "like a white Uluru".
what's a paddock?
Paddocks are where they keep the Dinosaurs from Jurasic Park.
My question is: Have the raptors escaped? It didn't take them long to get out during the power outage, so if the paddock itself is damaged, how far could they have come?
If you don't like the way I drive, stay the hell off the sidewalk.
If you don't like the way I fly, keep your damn car the hell out of the field.
P.S.
He said the balloon was then seen lying partially-inflated above a paddock "like a white Uluru".
What the hell is an Uluru?
I guess it's something that kinda looks like a partially-inflated balloon over a paddock, except it's not white.
Ah... yeah... something like that.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
you compare a country to a misspelling of its name and you have the audacity to question my grasp on geography?
put another shrimp on the barbie and go watch the sound of music kid, the part where crocodile dundee teaches julie andrew's eight kids how to sing
learn something before you spout your ignorance, stupid child
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
It may be a bad day for balloon launches, but at least jokes seem to be flying right past some people.
where they speak a dialect of australian
"clever girl..."
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
According to the BBC, the equipment was not damaged.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Crock Dundee must have been hiding near by.
"TV, a medium as it is neither rare nor well done." Ernie Kovacs
Balloon launches are notoriously unreliable. You would think something this intrinsically simple would be pretty reliable, but a huge fraction of these types of launches go wrong. FAR less reliable than, say, a sounding rocket, which are typically 4-9's.
I don't, however, see how they could have released it when they did. It was clear that the thing would swing in an arc into the ground from where they released it. Particularly with someone dead downwind.
Was it really a NASA balloon? What about the bodies witnesses claimed to see around the crash site? Those were just anthropomorphic dummies, eh? Video of the crash you say? Well, they have video of Apollo landing on the moon too and that didn't happen! *Wonders how long until someone says this in a non-joking manner*
Ha ha!
Anyone find this interesting that it took place in Roswell, Australia?
It's a UFO. Meanwhile, somewhere, Chris Carter's getting his notepad out.
"The payload fared worse, reportedly being smashed into a 'thousand pieces.'" and they all went skipping about, and that was the beginning of fairies. ... Australian fairies. O_o
Insurance fraud!
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced. - Geek's corollary to Clarke's law
As previously stated, this is a real let down. I'm sure they are all feeling very deflated right now. k.
What the hell was Australia doing out in space?
According to the AP story: http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/A/AS_AUSTRALIA_SPACE_BALLOON_MISHAP?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT this wasn't a NASA effort, it was a research project run by Berkley and some Taiwanese universities.
NASA: Close encounters of the thud kind.
It could have rained also, (with apologies to Mel Brooks).
Oh no!! it took years to build this small instrument. Now they will have to start it from scratch. http://www.articlesbase.com/health-articles/force-factor-review-amp-free-trial-2113761.html
The thought that scientific ballooning is necessarily easy is naive. The idea is to get cutting edge science at the edge of space for 1/10th to 1/20 the cost, 1/4 to 1/3 the time, and with cutting edge, often off-the-shelf technology rather than the retrograde schlock that is hardened/proven well enough for a stodgy satellite mission. The odds against success include:
1. Ridiculously thin resources. Satellites are launched with the unfathomable overhead. The resources are often the first attempt by academics and engineers, including undergraduate and graduate talent, with little guidance but plenty of smarts.
2. Difficult thermal environment. The thermal environment for a balloon is often more severe than for any satellite. The severe convective environment during ascent, the huge albedo and IR that is smaller for a satellite.
3. Communication limits. There is very limited bandwidth for communication available with a "high speed" vhf link (while it lasts).
4. Structural requirements- the com limitations mean that the gondola must survive a landing at perhaps 12mph vertically in a 30 mph crosswind on rocky terrain, perhaps after being dragged (some have been dragged hundreds of miles due to parachute problems) without ruining the pricey bits and preserving the precious stored data.
All this for a fraction of what a firm that has suckled at the tit of high overhead, government funded enterprise could dream of doing, and in a fraction of the time.
The two missions are not similar at all, and ballooning deserves a great deal of respect. The launch phase is very difficult, requiring timing, skill, and luck. Despite all these problems, the CSBF has something like a 92% success rate. A launch platform firm would cough nervously and excuse themselves from the room if one wanted this level of success.
Best wishes to the Compton team in getting back in the air. I know our upcoming balloon mission will need all th happy thoughts we can get for our upcoming mission in the summer.
After reading this article I just feel crushed about the whole ballooning thing in general, but it doesn't surprise me either..... seems like every time I read something from down under same old storyline 'super intelligent aussies have air let out of egos once more' oh well.....
In the name of all mathematicians everywhere I answer you: "Yes".
Do you have a degree in computer science or computer information systems? No, of course not: You're yet another dime-a-dozen slashdot wannabe computer expert (not, not minus those degrees slacker. You're no expert by any means).