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> “It was amazing,” he said. “It was beautiful. You could see the darkness of space and you could see the layers of atmosphere, which I had never seen before.”
by Yhippa 12y ago
> “It was amazing,” he said. “It was beautiful. You could see the darkness of space and you could see the layers of atmosphere, which I had never seen before.”
I want to experience this before I die.
- p1mrx 12y ago> I want to experience this before I die. This gets a lot cheaper when you remove the survival constraint.
- presumeaway 12y agoHe didn't specify the length of the interval between when he experiences it, and when he dies.
- anigbrowl 12y agoIt will be monetized before too long, and become available to anyone with $15,000 to spare.
- DanBC 12y agoWould people be allowed to dump that much helium on fun-runs? I have no idea how much this one jump used nor what that looks like in comparison to world stocks.
- ars 12y agoThere is no reason it can not be done with hydrogen. Yes, it's flammable, but we work with flammable materials all the time without issue.
- xhrpost 12y agoI wonder how high you would need to go before the lack of oxygen would make the hydrogen impossible to burn.
- ars 12y agoHydrogen burns very easily, but it doesn't matter. If you had a hydrogen leak at altitude you have bigger problems: You are about to fall. The fire and fuel is much lighter than air and would quickly rise away from you, so there is no hazard there. See the UFL for the numbers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flammability_limit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flammability_limit
- dshankar 12y agoThe risk (usually) isn't at high altitude but during the initial process of inflating the balloon with hydrogen. Static is especially dangerous.
- ars 12y agoOnly if there is oxygen, and there should be no oxygen inside the balloon. Any hydrogen leak would rapidly rise away so it's actually quite safe. Certainly much safer than gasoline and we use that every day - including sparks.
- anigbrowl 12y agoHelium is only ~$75 per million cubic feet. http://www.blm.gov/pgdata/etc/medialib/blm/nm/programs/0/helium_docs.Par.50876.File.dat/FY2012%20Prelim%20Posted%20Price.pdf http://www.blm.gov/pgdata/etc/medialib/blm/nm/programs/0/hel... I think the amount used for balloons is a tiny fraction of that used for welding and industrial processes.
- gibybo 12y agoSmall nit: That is the price per thousand cubic feet, not million. I'm not sure how much helium they used, but I'd estimate somewhere between 10 and 100 thousand cubic feet. Still a minor cost, of course.
- fletchowns 12y agoThe article states 35,000 cubic feet of helium was used
- frik 12y agoRed Bull used two road tankers. Also in the case of strato ballons the helium is lost to space, in the case of welding it's still contained in our earth atmosphere.
- jloughry 12y agoHydrogen is much less expensive than helium, gives slightly better lifting performance, and is not a scarce resource. Why don't more HAB projects use hydrogen? The only good reason I can think of, discounting the fire hazard, is the poor reputation of high pressure hydrogen tanks for the reverse Joule-Thomson effect (i.e., unlike most gasses, hydrogen heats up when expanded out of a nozzle), but according to [1] it is not enough to cause ignition. [1] Health and Safety Executive. 'Spontaneous Ignition of Hydrogen'. Research Report RR615, 2008. URL: www.hse.gov.uk/research/rrpdf/rr615.pdf