Hobby Club’s Missing Balloon Feared Shot Down By USAF | Aviation Week Network
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Although the club is not pointing fingers, there are suspicions among other prominent members of the small, pico-ballooning enthusiasts community.

Rest easy fellow patriots, the Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade will no longer be terrorizing our skies with their $12 pico balloons after being annihilated by our big, beautiful $400,000 sidewinder missiles.

  • neo [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    What prevents these pico balloons from just getting into a normal airplane's way?

    Pico balloons are typically about 3 ft. in diameter on the ground before they are launched. As they ascend to altitudes of 20,000-50,000 ft., the super-pressure balloon envelope expands by about 2-3 times in size and achieves neutral buoyancy, allowing them to float at a roughly consistent altitude. Wind currents then push them through the atmosphere, with some balloons capable of circling the world several times before they pop or fall.

    Couldn't they just at some point float on in front of a normal plane at that altitude?

    Launching high-altitude, circumnavigational pico balloons has emerged only within the past decade. Meadows and his son Lee discovered it was possible to calculate the amount of helium gas necessary to make a common latex balloon neutrally buoyant at altitudes above 43,000 ft. The balloons carry an 11-gram tracker on a tether, along with HF and VHF/UHF antennas to update their positions to ham radio receivers around the world. At any given moment, several dozen such balloons are aloft, with some circling the globe several times before they malfunction or fail for other reasons. The launch teams seldom recover their balloons.

    Is this just junk and pollution?

    • ClimateChangeAnxiety [he/him, they/them]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Mostly they avoid it by the sky being big and empty, so you’re mostly just not going to.

      But also in the US the limit is 6lbs of payload or you have to register it with the FAA. Basically even if a plane did hit one most planes would care the same amount as when they hit a bird, which is to say “not at all.”