To the Stratosphere

Solar-powered fixed-wing aircraft attached to a high-altitude balloon -  Ondirae Abdullah-Robinson

Defence Blog reports:

U.S. Army soldiers attached a solar-powered fixed-wing aircraft to a high-altitude balloon at Orote Airfield on Naval Station Guam on June 24, 2026, and prepared to launch the combination into the stratosphere as part of Valiant Shield 2026, the largest U.S.-led joint exercise in the Indo-Pacific.

This aircraft can cruise indefinitely at an altitude of 60,000 feet, which is 50% higher than commercial airliners. This is like U-2 territory (U-2 can reach 70,000 feet). Spy satellites will only have a specific spot on Earth visible for like ten minutes out of every 90 minute orbit, plus you only need a conventional radio to talk to an aircraft, not a specialized satellite communicator. Not sure why you can't use a conventional radio to talk to a satellite. Maybe because spy satellites have low power transmitters so you need a directional antennae to pick up their signal.

Previous posts about balloons and high altitude.

Piccard goes where no one has gone before

The First Trip To Earth’s Stratosphere Was A Disaster
SciShow

Different Piccard, but still an explorer. Piccards have appeared here before:

• First Solar Powered Airplane to have flown around the world
• Whale Graveyard

Blimp

Goodyear Blimp

It's not really a blimp anymore:

Beginning in 2014, Goodyear replaced its three U.S. blimps with three new semi-rigid airships; built by the Luftschiffbau Zeppelin company, each have a rigid internal frame. Although technically incorrect, Goodyear continues to use "blimp" in reference to these new semi-rigid models.

 

Previous blimp posts:

• ZMC-2
• Straight out of Carson
• Inflatables

Power from the Sky

The S1500, China’s new 1 megawatt flying wind turbine.

Brian Potter points to a story on Clean Technica. They seem to be planning on deploying these things in the jet stream, umpteen thousands of feet in the air.

Chinese Balloon

Sailors recover a high-altitude Chinese surveillance balloon off the coast of Myrtle Beach, S.C. on Feb. 5, 2023. (Tyler Thompson/U.S. Navy via The New York Times)

My Daily Kona has a report on the Chinese balloon that explains the story a bit better:

The heat generated by the electronic systems appeared to be enough to provide a targeting lock for the imaging infrared seeker in the AIM-9X. The height of the target—60,000-65,000 ft.—still required the missile to ascend several thousand feet from a launch point at 58,000 ft., a senior defense official says.

 

Higher

A U.S. Air Force pilot looked down at the suspected Chinese surveillance balloon as it hovered over the Central Continental United States February 3, 2023. Recovery efforts began shortly after the balloon was downed. (Photo courtesy of the Department of Defense)

Pretty cool. Airliners fly at 40,000 feet. The U2 can get up to 70,000 feet. This balloon was at 60,000 feet. Balloons can get higher. Remember Felix, the balloon jumper? That was from 127,000 feet.

I'm reading Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer about the 1996 Mt. Everest climbing disaster. Mt. Everest is 29,000 feet tall. Base camp, starting point for most every climging expedition, is at 15,000 feet. The FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) requires pilots to have supplemental oxygen if they are flying over 12,000 feet. I've been up to around 10,000 feet while hiking and I got to tell you there's no air up there.

Via My Daily Kona

P.S. Neil deGrasse Tyson tells us that the tallest mountain, measured from the Earthś center is not Mt. Everest, but Mt. Chimborazo in South America:

Neil deGrasse Tyson - the tallest mountain relative to Earth's center
It's not rocket science

Tallest Mountains in South America

Turns out that eight of the ten tallest mountains, as measured from the center of the Earth, are all in South America within a few degrees of the equator.

Chinese Balloon

Chinese Spy Balloon

View From The Porch has a good overview of the balloon story.

New-to-me acronym: SEAD - Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses

JMSmith has a post up about Tom Sawyer's experience with balloons, to which I commented:

Shooting down a big balloon is not an easy task. Little balloons will pop if you poke them, but big balloons will hardly notice. The hold so much gas, the difference in pressure between inside and outside is so small, that the small holes (like those made by bullets) leak so slowly, that they make no real difference to the balloon’s flight. Came across this bit of information a while back and couldn’t resist the opportunity to share it.

Project Loon

FlightRadar24 USA

Posthip Scott sends me a link to Flightradar24 which shows all the airplanes currently flying. Good golly, there are a bunch of them. And this is since COVID-19 crashed the airline industry.

FlightRadar24 North America

If we zoom out I'll bet we can make it look like the entire country is carpeted with aircraft. Okay, that's silly, but what are those round icons out in the middle of the Caribbean?

FlightRadar24 Madagascar

Image is darker because it is nighttime there now.

Look, there is a whole bunch of them over Mauritius and Reunion (which is important because I am currently reading The Mauritius Command by Patrick O'Brian). 

Loon Balloon in what looks like Africa

The balloon just below the left end of the lake

Click on one of these round icons and I find it's a weather balloon operated by Loon enterprises and when I look them up I find they are competing with Elon Musk and his constellation of Starlink satellites to bring internet to the ends of the Earth. Huh.

So these things are being set adrift in the atmosphere and in short order they drift away. It looks like there are about 16 balloons in the area, and only 3 of them are over the islands, so they must have a fairly high attrition rate. All the components that go into one of these balloons are relatively cheap, but by the time you've got one assembled and launched it has to be at least a small chunk of change. I don't see how it can be a viable business. But maybe Richie Rich is bank rolling the whole deal as a stop gap measure until Starlink becomes fully operational.

Rigidizable

Kinescope Recording of Big Shot-2 Satellite Balloon Suborbital Inflation
Back in the early 60's, NASA's Project Echo put a couple of very large balloons into orbit. Echo 1 was 100 feet in diameter and Echo 2 was 135 feet in diameter. I remember looking up at the night sky when I was a little kid and seeing them sail by. Dots of light is all they were. Or maybe that was Sputnik. Whatever.

Before they launched these giant mylar balloons into orbit, the launched a couple of balloons 250 miles into space to test their inflation scheme. Low earth orbit, which is where the International Space Station is, is about 100 miles, so they were well up there. This was back in the 60's, so putting something into orbit was a real stretch. Launching something straight up was much easier. Putting something in orbit requires accelerating to around five miles per second. Sending something 250 miles straight up only required reaching a velocity of around two miles per second. Much, much easier.

The first one (Big Shot 1) failed when "the balloon was torn apart due to rapid inflation". The second one (shown in the video above) was a success. This video comes to us through a Rube Goldberg combination of technology:

A Kinescope is a film recording of a television screen. It really is that simple: a film camera aimed at a TV. But why? Primarily because early videotape was unreliable, expensive, and low quality. Many early television broadcasts were recorded via Kinescope before videotapes became available. NASA used Kinescope to record live feeds from space off of video monitors. - The Unwritten Record

The balloons themselves were pretty amazing.

Unlike Echo 1, Echo 2's skin was rigidizable, and the balloon was capable of maintaining its shape without a constant internal pressure. This removed the requirement for a long term supply of inflation gas, and meant that the balloon could easily survive strikes from micrometeoroids. The balloon was constructed from "a 0.35 mil (9 µm) thick mylar film sandwiched between two layers of 0.18 mil (4.5 µm) thick aluminum foil and bonded together." The balloon was inflated to such a level as required to slightly plastically deform the metal layers of the laminate, while leaving the polymer in the elastic range. This resulted in a rigid and very smooth spherical shell. - Wikipedia

I think what this means is that they used enough pressure to slightly stretch the balloon material. For a big balloon like this, you would need a great deal of pressure to stretch the whole thing. On the other hand, you have an enormous volume of gas doing the pressing, and the material is very thin (.0007 inches, less than a sheet of typing paper), so maybe they only needed a small amount of pressure. In any case they used enough pressure to stretch the aluminum so it stayed stretched (kind of like stretching a slug of aluminum into a beer can), but not so much that it ripped the mylar film.

Morse Code Decoder

I tried decoding the beeps in the video. They sound like they could be Morse Code, but I couldn't make much sense of it. Seems to be something like N-R-F-R-E-0 repeated over and over again.

Via Indy Tom

Space TV

Kelvin Jones : Call You Home from Joe Connor on Vimeo.
Joe expounds:

Yup, that really is a TV in space, for real. I created this video by sending a vintage Sony TV into orbit on a weather balloon provided by Sent Into Space, surrounded by cameras so as to capture this spectacular footage hovering above the Big Blue Marble itself.
More precisely, it took two launches - both from Snowdonia in Wales, with two identical TVs, with each launch providing the opportunity to rig the GoPros in different positions.
I'm pleased to say that all TVs in this music video were harmed as they crash-landed back to earth. We sent the TV off from Snowdonia and it landed in Bury, Manchester - taking in my hometown of Warrington on the way which can be seen in the promo. I'm proud to say that the TV got 99.997% above the atmosphere, just 0.003% below the Armstrong line - surely the highest TV in history.

Update 9/13/15: This video got me thinking about how glass-tube-type TV's are rapidly disappearing and how much grief people will put up with to get something they want, like their favorite sitcom.

Watching Westerns while on the job. Very bad.

Which reminded me of a scene from the movie Brazil, where we have a bunch of young guys in suits in an office with some kind of displays on their desk and they are all watching an old Western, until the boss sticks his head out of his office door, where upon they all simultaneously switch back to their work screen until he goes back inside, and then poof! Back to the shoot-em-up!

Super Pressure Balloon

Super Pressure balloon shortly before release. Note the yellow machine on the ground.

While reading about some NASA balloon projects, I came across this picture of the launch of a balloon from an airport in New Zealand. I thought it gave a pretty good idea of the size of the thing.

Super Pressure balloon being inflated. Now you can see how big that machine is.

Especially when you find out that the little bitty yellow device on the ground in the top picture is actually a giant frigging 80 ton crane.

Super Pressure Balloon's route around the bottom of the world.

This was a Super Pressure balloon, designed to maintain a constant altitude for days on end. This one managed to stay aloft for a month before a leak prompted them to bring it down in Australia.
     Most high altitude balloons are zero pressure - the pressure of the helium inside is the same as the air outside. During the day the balloon warms up, the helium expands and the balloon goes up. During the night, it cools off, contracts and the balloon loses altitude. With a Super Pressure balloon, the volume is fixed. It stays the same day and night. Since the volume doesn't change, the altitude doesn't change, at least not as much as a conventional balloon. These things are flying around at an altitude of about 25 miles, three times as high as your typical jetliner.
    I suspect the term 'Super Pressure' is a bit of a misnomer. I suspect you would be hard pressed to be able to measure the pressure in the balloon when it is at altitude. Since there is almost no air at that height, it wouldn't take much to keep the balloon inflated. Just how much pressure? At 33.5 kilometers, which was this balloon's nominal altitude, the atmospheric air pressure is about 19 millibars, so one millibar of pressure is probably enough to keep this thing happy. (Ground level air pressure is around 1,000 millibars.)

BRRISON Balloon Launch

When Felix took that balloon ride last year, I got the impression that that was the biggest balloon in the world. Seems that is not the case. This one is 20% bigger in height, and one third bigger in volume. It doesn't look like much when it is launched, but then we have air down here near sea level. Get up there in the stratosphere and there is hardly any air, which means hardly any air pressure, which means the balloon is free to expand to its full glory.


This isn't the BRISSON launch, but a similar one done down in the antarctic. You can see the BRISSON Launch on this Facebook page.

Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility

There's a balloon going up tomorrow morning, It's being launched from Fort Sumner, New Mexico. The story is a bit confusing because it says the Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility, which Google puts in Palestine, Texas. However, both the site in New Mexico and the one in Texas are both run by the University of New Mexico. The Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility lists both sites as well as some others.



View Larger Map  

This is the one in Palestine. The big circle is about two thousand feet across. I find it gratifying when I look up a place on Google Maps and find something there that corresponds to the information that led me here. This is East Texas, a couple miles West of Palestine, just down the road from Nacogdoches and roughly equidistant from Dallas, Houston and Shreveport, Louisiana. The name Nacogdoches (pronounced Nak-a-doe-ches, by me anyway) sticks in my mind for some reason. The only thing I've come up with is that the Stephen F. Austin State University is there, though I have no idea why that might be important.

Giant Hot Air Balloons

Disasters seem to be the topic this week. I was talking to Jack on Monday and he mentioned the hot air balloon crash that happened in Egypt earlier this year that killed 19 people. I vaguely remember hearing about it, and while 19 is a lot of people for a balloon crash, it could have been a freak accident that involved a bus or something, and I didn't think any more about it. Turns out that all of the people who died were riding in the same balloon.

Some random group of tourists.

I didn't know they made such large ones. All I have ever seen is the small baskets that hold three or maybe four people. A balloon big enough to lift three people is huge, a balloon big enough to lift two dozen must be ginormous! I spent some time trying to find chart that would illustrate the different sizes of balloons, but all I could find was this chart from the Red Bull record setting high altitude parachute jump from last year.

Eventually I realized that a balloon's lifting capacity goes up by the cube of the diameter, so a balloon that is twice as big in diameter as a normal 3 or 4 person balloon would be able to lift 8 times as many people (2 x 2 x 2), or 24 to 32. One of these giant tourist balloons would not be as big as number 2 on this chart. Spreadsheet of popular commercial balloon sizes and capacities here.  It takes about 64 cubic feet of hot air to provide one pound of lift.

Felix Baumgartner - Space Man

Since Roberta X and Tam alerted me to this event this morning, I was able to watch it live along with 7 million of my closest friends. I wonder if this set some kind of YouTube record. I mean, that's more than one person out of a thousand on the entire planet. Red Bull, the energy (?) drink maker sponsored this event. Giant balloon made out of old sandwich bags which they had somehow split into five layers and then seamless glued them all together, filled with gas near Roswell, New Mexico, and then let go. It reached an altitude of 128,000 feet (24 miles) whereupon they began the step-off-edge checklist. First order of business was to depressurize the capsule. Don't do it all at once, want to make sure your pressure suit is holding before you give away all your air. By the time they got the door open, the balloon had dropped down to 127,000 and something. Felix sat there for a minute after he got the door open. The ground controller is telling him to step outside, but Felix isn't moving. I think he was taking in the view. I think I would have spent a couple of hours looking at the view. A few seconds later though, Felix stepped outside and then stepped off into nothing. 2 hours plus to go up, five minutes to come back down. Preliminary estimates of his speed exceed 700 MPH. He was tumbling pretty good for a while, not spinning, but definitely tumbling, but eventually he got down to where there was some air and he straightened out.

Inflatables

I was talking to a blimp guy the other day and he mentioned that the blimps they built use a special low-permeability skin, and I thought that's what we need in inner tubes for bicycle tires, especially for road bikes. I mean, how many times should you have to pump up a tire? You need to inflate car tires maybe once or twice a year, if that. High pressure (100 PSI) road bike tires have to be pumped up durn near every day, or at least once a week. So maybe this blimp material would be good for bicycle tires.

Probably not, blimps don't run high pressure, they have enormous volume relative to surface area, and the skin doesn't need to be flexible. Actually, the less flexible the better. Still, you would think someone would have come up with a better material for bicycle inner tubes. This is one of the big bug-a-boos of high technology. We can build carbon fiber frames that weigh next to nothing, but we cannot build an inner tube that will hold it's pressure. I put this in the same category as shoe laces: places where high technology has fallen on it's big fat face.

The blimp guy also mentioned that the military had been looking at using blimps for aerial reconnaissance. Wouldn't they be easy to shoot down? Well, yes, if you have a weapon that can reach them, like anti-aircraft missiles or fighter aircraft, but regular small arms are not much of a threat. You don't have to be too high up to be out of reach of even a high powered rifle. WWII Bofors 40 mm anti-aircraft gun was effective up to about a mile and a half of altitude. Using our old reliable physics formulas, a bullet fired with a muzzle velocity of 2500 FPS (feet per second), could theoretically reach an altitude of 18 miles , but that's without considering air resistance. And air resistance is crucial. A high velocity bullet traveling horizontally initially loses one FPS of velocity for each foot traveled . So being a mile high should put you out of the reach of small arms, and still put you close enough to the ground to be able to see what's going, especially with most any kind of optics.

Bullet holes by themselves are not a big problem. The holes they make are small, the volume of the blimp is so large, and the pressure so low, that a single bullet hole poses no real threat. The promotional blimps you see flying around sporting events seem to act as bullet magnets for any yahoos in the neighborhood, so the blimp people are very familiar bullet holes.

The big problem with blimps is not with flying them, but landing and launching. A steady breeze they can handle, but when it gets really windy, you also tend to get gusts and changes of wind direction, and those kind of things make a blimp's life miserable. So small unmanned aircraft seem to be the military's preferred method.