upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow1337:
Giant surveillance balloons are lurking at the edge of space:
Founded in 2012 by Taber MacCallum and Jane Poynter of Biosphere 2 fame, World View was originally conceived as a platform for human journeys to the upper stratosphere. Given that only a handful of people have piloted stratospheric balloons and lived to tell the tale, it was an ambitious goal—but the company had the technical chops to back it up. In 2014, MacCallum and Poynter worked together on a mission to send Google executive Alan Eustace on a record-breaking space-diving journey to 136,000 feet suspended beneath a stratospheric balloon.
But it wasn't at all clear there was enough demand for ferrying humans to the upper stratosphere, so in February, World View tapped Ryan Hartman, the former president and CEO of the drone company Insitu, to retool the company as a data services platform. The idea is to use long-lasting stratospheric balloons to collect high-resolution images of Earth and sell this data to the government and private companies.
Given his background in drones, Hartman is intimately familiar with the concept of Earth surveillance as a service. He says World View aims to fill a niche that can't be met by more conventional technologies like drones and satellites, which involve compromises in the quality of images, the area these images cover, and the frequency with which images are collected. Stratospheric balloons promise cheap access to incredibly high-resolution images that can be collected anywhere on Earth. Using off-the-shelf imaging hardware, World View can take photos with 15-centimeter resolution from 75,000 feet, and its custom-made cameras will soon be capable of 5 centimeters.
According to Hartman, World View's system is sensitive enough to tell whether a person on the ground is "holding a shovel or a gun." Unsurprisingly, perhaps, World View has attracted the interest of the US Department of Defense, which Hartman says will be one of the company's first customers when it starts selling its data next year. He says the company has also received a lot of attention from the energy sector, which is interested in using the image data to monitor its oil and gas wells, transmission lines, and other critical assets.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by barbara hudson on Tuesday December 24 2019, @03:29PM (20 children)
Usually, to steer a balloon, you either drop ballast to rise or leak gas to reduce buoyancy, until you find a wind current going where you want to go. You can only do that a limited amount of times before you run out of either ballast or helium.
Most of the worlds surface isn't all that interesting - hi res pictures of empty oceans, for example. The real action is where people are, so either passing repeatedly over the same spot (satellite) or flying over it without depending on favourable winds is required.
And going over other countries just invites them being destroyed (sharknadoes with frigging lasers attacking surveillance balloons coming to a cable channel near you!)
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(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday December 24 2019, @04:02PM (2 children)
The usual suspects could destroy spy sats if they wanted to.
Can Iran or North Korea hit the balloon? Maybe, maybe not.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Tuesday December 24 2019, @05:01PM (1 child)
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday December 25 2019, @03:18PM
(Score: 4, Informative) by Immerman on Tuesday December 24 2019, @04:55PM (14 children)
Fortunately, in the upper stratosphere there's not much need for steering. You're in black-sky territory, far above the weather systems driven by the thermal gradients on Earth's surface.
You do still probably need to do some navigation and station keeping - but there's no need to drop ballast for that. You seem to be thinking in terms of hot air balloons, which are pretty much a low-tech enthusiast sport. Weather balloons and such often do it as well, because it's cheap and their demands are low.
More sophisticated systems have existed for a long time though - I guarantee you trans-atlantic airship flights in the 1930s weren't dropping ballast or venting expensive helium for routine buoyancy control.
You could adopt the common airship strategy of using ballonets - sort of ballast tanks filled with ambient air: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballonet [wikipedia.org]
Or instead you can put a small compressor between your balloon and a reserve lift-gas tank to provide closed-cycle buoyancy control. Make the compressor reversible to regenerate power when the gas flows back into the balloon, and you can even greatly reduce the net energy consumption.
For more demanding navigation, you can always also add propellors, etc. The Airship to Orbit folks have actually done a lot of interesting work on neutral-buoyancy black-sky navigation systems, with the eventual intent of being able to accelerate a gargantuan ultra-light airship to orbital speeds.
(Score: 2, Informative) by barbara hudson on Tuesday December 24 2019, @05:32PM (2 children)
High altitude super pressure helium balloons have crappy endurance and even in the stratosphere still only go where the winds push it. NASA set the record of 47 days, riding the southern circumpolar vortex; most are much less.
Last I looked, there's a worldwide shortage of helium. Yep, still short [cnbc.com]
There's no future for these balloons. Time to go back to hydrogen. Should be interesting.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday December 25 2019, @03:22PM (1 child)
And what's crappy about 47 days in atmosphere without supply?
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Wednesday December 25 2019, @06:55PM
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 24 2019, @05:58PM (10 children)
Were all flown with Hydrogen, not helium.
The only exceptions I know of were the US and maybe UK military airships, the only ones to make international crossings being German made. While there have been both rigid and semi-rigid airships since, none of them have been made for international travel, as far as I know.
Please provide links if you have any refutations. They are no doubt an interesting read.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Tuesday December 24 2019, @07:31PM (9 children)
Where did you get the idea I thought ww2-era airships used helium? Helium, being monatomic, would have just leaked out of the gas chambers before they would finish the flight.
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(Score: 2) by zeigerpuppy on Tuesday December 24 2019, @10:35PM (8 children)
The Hindenburg was designed for helium. But there was a shortage and it was run on hydrogen before the disaster.
in those days there were regular transatlantic services by airship.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by barbara hudson on Wednesday December 25 2019, @12:38AM (7 children)
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday December 25 2019, @03:28PM (6 children)
Yes, it would. It just wouldn't be able to carry as much passengers and luggage. Helium has double the density of hydrogen (0.18 kg per cubic meter versus 0.09 kg per cubic meter at STP), but that takes off less than 10% of the lifting capacity of the balloon (which displaces air that has roughly 1.2 kg per cubic meter at STP).
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Wednesday December 25 2019, @06:52PM (5 children)
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday December 26 2019, @04:54AM (4 children)
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Thursday December 26 2019, @01:37PM (3 children)
And then we have the conceptual error- the bottom row gives the 21000 pounds of extra lift left over for passengers, freight, etc. Loaded to that weight, it's no longer lighter than air. It's neutral buoyancy, which means it will just sit there on the mooring mast. Well, you could use both engines to generate enough lift by flying in a nose up position, but you only have enough fuel to keep one engine running at a time if you want to cross the ocean - which is the original plan. You'll also increase wind resistance, so you're going to burn more fuel. And you have used up any margin of safety for completing the trip except on bright sunny days. Hydrogen was always the only option at the time.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday December 27 2019, @01:01AM (2 children)
It also causes the atmosphere that the lifting gas is displacing to shrink as well. There's little net effect.
No, you've just claimed that.
The 455,000 pounds was with everything, including passengers and freight.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Friday December 27 2019, @01:47AM (1 child)
Do the math.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday December 27 2019, @05:31AM
As I noted, the air is also less by volume at those lower temperatures. There's some non-ideal effects, but the result is that over temperature ranges on Earth, a particular mass of hydrogen or helium displaces a near constant mass of air.
(Score: 3, Informative) by darkfeline on Wednesday December 25 2019, @12:36AM (1 child)
Or you can just do what Project Loon does, by compressing and decompressing the buoyant gas. With solar panels and some AI magic, you can navigate balloons for an extended period of time.
https://thenextweb.com/google/2015/03/09/this-is-how-google-will-control-project-loon-balloons-altitudes/ [thenextweb.com]
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(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Wednesday December 25 2019, @01:01AM
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