Take a Baloon Ride to the Edge of Space

Yearning for that once in a lifetime ride, but just can't justify the 200k that would get you a seat on Virgin Galactic sub-orbital  flight, then a ride aboard World View's gondola for a measly 75k may just be your ticket.

World View conducted a 1/10 scale, June 18th, to test of the critical systems.  The craft rose to 120,000 feet then descended to  50,000 where it deployed a parafoil which allowed for an uneventful landing. 

Chief technology officer Taber MacCallum wrote in an email to Discovery News - after reviewing the data, engineers will make the necessary changes.  “We anticipate flying both sub-scale unmanned systems and full-mass simulator test articles,”

Here Comes that Daring Young Man in His Flying Life Boat?!

Ah yes, thank listener Dan for this sublime noodle canoldle! But in truth the head line is correct. Johnathan Trappe from north Carolina plans to come to Maine.somewhere in either Caribou or Presque Isle,(because of the northerly Maine location) strap a crapload of balloons to a lifeboat and float across the Atlantic to Europe

Trappe's lifeboat gondola is the famed Portland Pudgie, built in Portland by David Hubert.

If this all sounds a bit familiar, Trappe, using the same cluster of balloons, has flown over Lake Michigan, the English channel and the Alps.

Trappe say that he now will begin prepping in May and will wait for the best conditions to arrive for a successful crossing between July 1 and September 30.



Here is the complete Portland Press article link

Space Shuttle launch, shot by a camera phone

Now this is what I call a great amateur photo! Here we have a shuttle launch captured by a cell phone of all things. Whats better though is that the camera wasn't on a plane but much much higher - in the equipment pod of a helium weather balloon!

Here is the info from the IO9 article:

• Quest for Stars, a non-profit educational organization co-sponsored by Challenger Center for Space Science Education has launched weather-balloon-hoisted cameras into space before, but this time around, the group of students and educators wanted to capture the actual Shuttle launch from space. So they put together Robonaut-1..... and sent it up 100,000 feet.

As you can see, they were spectacularly successful!

Check out the complete IO9 article here

Baloon Launched Observatory Destroyed

In a spectaular crash, today in Alice Springs, a territory of in northern Australia, over 2 million dollars in a painstakingly built telescope. The Nuclear Compton Telescope (NCT), a gamma-ray telescope was to be carried aloft by a huge helium balloon.

The research balloon was built by NASA's Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility in Palestine, Texas was expected to haul its two-telescope payload up to an altitude of about 120,000 feet, but failed to lift the payload more than a few feet at which time the payload crashed back to earth and was dragged several hundred of feet.

View the raw film of the crash here
Original Space.com article here Lots of images

Thanks to Tim Sayell for the link