Elon Musk's latest SpaceX idea involves a party balloon and bounce house:
Elon Musk took to Twitter Sunday night to announce a new recovery method for an upper-stage SpaceX rocket. A balloon — a "giant party balloon" to quote him directly — will ferry part of a rocket to a bounce house. Seriously.
[...] This isn't the first time a balloon has been used to return a rocket. Legendary programmer John Carmack's rocket company attempted to use a ballute in 2012 to return a rocket body and nose cone. It didn't work as planned and, according to officials at the time, the rocket made a "hard landing" around the Spaceport America property in New Mexico.
SpaceX has yet to recover the entire Falcon 9 fairing despite adding a parachute and positioning a boat to catch it.
The TESS launch has been delayed to Wednesday.
Also at Engadget and Space.com.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 18 2018, @05:57PM
I'm confused by the balloon idea, they need to fill the balloon with something, some gas, right?
Anything that they have to take up with them is heavy, so the obvious choice is to just use atmospheric air.
But then, why not just use a parachute? Then you only need to pack the top half of the balloon.