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News: Brits with altitude prepare to float into space in a giant balloon



 
 
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Old July 11th 03, 05:54 AM
Rusty Barton
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Default News: Brits with altitude prepare to float into space in a giant balloon

Brits with altitude prepare to float into space in a giant balloon

A bag of helium the size of the Empire State building to challange
Nasa record

Tim Radford, science editor
Friday July 11, 2003
The Guardian

Andy Elson, 50, and Colin Prescot, 53, spent yesterday morning
strapped into chairs inside a freezer at a temperature of -44 C, being
intermittently blasted with artificial sunlight, inside a workshop in
an airfield at Boscombe Down, near Salisbury.
It was the last full dress rehearsal before - sometime in the next few
weeks - they climb into their Russian spacesuits, strap themselves
into their cockpit chairs, slowly inflate the biggest balloon ever
made, and float towards the heavens at 1,000 feet a minute, into a
temperature of around -60 C and an altitude of 132,000 feet, or about
25 miles.

They will be suspended from a bag of helium inflated to 310 times its
original volume, and their lives will depend on exquisitely accurate
weather forecasts, a battery of state of the art engineering, and
their pressure suits. If anything goes wrong, if the suits fail, death
would take about half a second.

"Once you get past about 33,000 feet, you are unable to breathe
unaided. Even if you are breathing oxygen, it has to be forced in
under pressure. At about 44,000 feet, you need to be wearing a
pressure suit, because if not the blood will start to heat and
actually boil. At anything over 40,000 feet, you are in big trouble if
a suit fails," says Brian Jones, veteran of a round-the-world balloon
flight, an altitude record holder, and mission controller to the
flight of Qinetiq 1. The pressure at 25 miles altitude is one
thousandth of the pressure at sea level. Flesh and blood are mostly
water. Work it out.

"We have done some pretty vivid demonstrations of putting half a pint
of water in a decompression chamber and decompressing it to 100,000
feet and the water boils and explodes in less than half a second, just
disappears. It's scary stuff," he says. The view, however, should
compensate for the hazard. "The sky goes black when you look up at
just above 60,000 feet, so from then on, when they look up they are
looking into the blackness of space, instead of the blue sky. From
132,000 feet, assuming they get there, they will see the curvature of
the earth."

Qinetiq 1 is the stuff of dreams and meticulous planning. The balloon
- it takes its name from its sponsor Qinetiq, the government defence
research agency - has a skin about the thickness of a freezer bag. On
the launch day it will rise slowly from the deck of an
Qinetiq-designed experimental naval trimaran called Triton off the
coast of Cornwall and float to the height of the Empire State Building
before it begins to lift its tiny gondola bearing two humans, two
chairs, instruments, sunscreen, wind barriers, and ballast.

The height to which it will fly is governed precisely by the amount of
helium it encloses. As atmosphere becomes less dense, the helium
expands, and at 130,000 feet the helium will have expanded 300-fold.

"So the balloon starts off as a raggedy, floppy thing and then
eventually at altitude will completely fill. When it is completely
full of helium the balloon cannot go any higher, because if it does,
the helium will just escape," says Jones. The whole exercise will take
12 hours or more. During that time, the helionauts will measure cosmic
and solar radiation, run a series of experiments, concentrate on
controlling the craft and snatch moments to admire the view through
their visors. Photographs will be taken by a tethered companion craft
called Zephyr, a solar-powered glider with a wingspan of 12 metres and
a total weight of 12 kilograms.

The project is the climax of twin obsessions with hot air. Andy Elson
is an aeronautical engineer from Wells in Somerset, who piloted the
world's first hot air balloon flight over Mt Everest and then made two
attempts to float around the world. Colin Prescot is a businessman
from Stockbridge in Hampshire, who began in advertising and ended up
with a balloon company that co-ordinated all the flying and aerial
sequences for the last eight James Bond films.

They tried to circle the world together in 1998. They spent last
summer waiting for ideal weather to make an assault on the world
balloon altitude record, set at 113,000 feet by Nasa pilots in 1961.
The ideal weather never arrived. They dare not risk high winds: the
balloon is so tall that wind shear could rip the fabric apart.

This summer, wearing the new Russian space suits tested yesterday,
they will try again. Takeoff could be any time between now and
mid-September. Coming down will present as many challenges as going
up: to lose height the helionauts will vent gas through a valve for a
few seconds and the balloon will lose a small amount of its buoyancy
and begin to sink.

As it begins to sink, the gas will start to contract and the balloon
will start to sink even faster. At which point, the pilots will start
to discard ballast in the form of tiny glass beads to lighten the
burden and slow the descent. The aim is to come down at less than
1,500 feet a minute until they reach 15,000 feet, and then slow to
less than 1,000 feet a minute. This is relatively gentle. A second
world war military parachute descends at 1,800 feet a minute.

The two adventurers need cloudless skies, high pressure, gentle winds
and a 72-hour forecast they can be confident in.

They have to think about more than just the weather and the fabric and
the controls. When they get the word, they will begin a three-day diet
of what nutritionists politely call "solid low residue food" and
"elemental drinks" to sidestep the obvious challenge of life inside a
space suit. And yes, they will also wear nappies.

No food, little water, but plenty of bottle

· Seven times higher than Nelson's column, Qineteq 1 will hold 44m
cubic feet of gas. It is made of polyethylene

· A three-hull design will keep the research ship Triton so stable
that the balloon will be exactly vertical as it is launched from its
deck

· The solar-powered companion glider Zephyr will fly in an atmosphere
only 1% as dense as that of sea level. It will circle the balloon, on
a quarter of a mile-long tether, filming the ascent and sending images
back to mission control

· The flight platform will remain open to the winds. Its square base
allows it to float like a raft when the pilots splash down in the sea

· Elson and Prescot spent 18 days in a balloon capsule in 1998 before
ditching in the Pacific, the longest nonstop flight on any suborbital
craft

· During the flight they may drink but not eat. They can hold only
two-thirds of a litre of water

· Solid 'low-residue' foods eaten before takeoff include meat, cheese,
eggs, prawns, white bread, peeled potatoes, white rice and pasta - but
no vegetable sauces.



http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/news/...996082,00.html


--
Rusty Barton - Antelope, California
  #2  
Old July 11th 03, 07:59 PM
Rusty B
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Default News: Brits with altitude prepare to float into space in a giant balloon

Rusty Barton wrote in message . ..
Brits with altitude prepare to float into space in a giant balloon

A bag of helium the size of the Empire State building to challange
Nasa record


http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/news/...996082,00.html



Additional information and pictures at the BBC News website:

BALLOONING 25-MILES HIGH

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/h...ml/default.stm



--
Rusty Barton - Antelope, California
 




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