Balloons in Space!

anybody been to space yet? I have not been to space, Jonathan. I have also not been to space. Have you been to space? Space? Noel has also not been to space. What a bummer, Jonathan. You even kind of looked like the star baby. I know, I know, it's uh, you know, it's I also built a monolith in my yard. My neighbors are crazy mad because we have a shared communal space. So are they so crazy mad that they like beat you with giant bones? They they have been there, they're

certainly working up to it. Okay, Yeah, Well, we've talked about space tourism before because everybody kind of wants to go to space. But there's a problem that it's not so easy to get there. It's not so cheap to get there. Yeah, right, well, that would be one of the subsets. Yeah, I think. I think if you were to be truly like nail it down to the number of people who have been space tourists, that it's it's fewer than ten as I recall something like seven people

one person, maybe more like twelve. I don't know, it depends on who you count. But most of the people who have been to space have been professional astronauts, people who really know what they're doing. Yeah, But amateurs want to go to space too. Yeah. So space tourism is clearly on the way. There's a demand for it, and so somebody's going to find a way to see apply it. But there are still problems because it's going to be really expensive. Rocket launches are costly and somewhat dangerous. Are

we going to have a space elevator soon? We've talked about that. It would be pretty cool, but it's probably if it will ever exist, it's a long long way off right there. They're fundamental difficulties with that technology. One the big ones, yeah, find finding fighting material that has the tensile strength to be secure as a tether from the Earth to some object in orbit upon which an elevator could climb. It's it's a non trivial problem. Yeah,

that's to say the least. So are there any other alternative ways we could think about getting people to have that space tourism experience without depending on the super expensive, dangerous rocket launches or waiting for some kind of crazy technology to emerge. How about catapults? Guys, that was the first one that was I think, I think there's something

to this. Well, someone else wrote it down. I just I just went with it because, Okay, what's arguably the world's largest trebiche, which is a replica from old Danish designs. It's housed in Warwick Castle, and you might have guessed Warwickshire, England consend stuff flying nearly a thousand feet that's some three hundreds and it only takes a team like an

hour to prepare the equipment for launch. So that's like efficiency right there compared to the space perfect you just have those like at three intervals in how close is that to space? I guess far away. I guess we'll find out in a bit y. Yeah, I've got some other proposed alternatives to chemical rockets like the Mario super Jump. I'll him saying, ok, I look, I'm not I'm not against it. In fact, I was just talking to the director of the George Renaissance Festival about the fact that

there needs to be a catapult ride. Although clearly one of the important questions you would ask the person before they are aimed at the net is hey, have you had anything to eat today? Because that's that's going to

affect our calculations. Um but no, I wanted to talk about some of the actual alternative proposals for chemical rockets, because, as we have pointed out, they are expensive and dangerous potentially, so we have to look and see if there's something else that we could use for getting stuff from Earth into space. And there's been a lot of hypothetical proposals or the proposals are real, but it's all based on hypothesis. They're they're essentially in the same level of reality as

the space elevator. I'm a little loopy, um but no. These include the cable space accelerator, which imagine this, You've got a ramp. It doesn't have to be a ramp, but the most common version I've seen as a ramp, and you have a series of drive motors in that ramp. The drive motors can attach to a cable and pull the cable up the ramp, and after the cable passes the drive motor, it essentially gets a handoff to the

next drive motor. Each drive motor in that series is moving at a faster rpm, so it's pulling the cable faster each time. The other end of the cable is attached to a vehicle, preferably a winged one, and then when the winged one gets to the end of the ramp, by that point it's moving at a hypersonic speed and can direct itself more and a more vertical orientation and thus escape the bonds of earth um without having to use chemical rockets for the initial launch. Okay, cool, Yeah,

so sort of the same way that us. Some aircraft use a traditional launch pattern to get them to like normal feet cruising altitude, and then uh, we'll use a secondary booster to go super fast, or even a military jet on a on like an aircraft carrier where they can have it's it's essentially a catapult system to accelerate them at at really high speed so they can take off and a shortened runway, same sort of thing, but

you know, kind of ramped up a notch. So then you have also an idea called a circle launcher and space keeper, which honestly I have Actually it's actually from there is a proposal and you can there's a Google books has a PDF of the entire thing, and it's incredibly long, and the physics got so complicated that I

stopped reading. So I know that it's it's got a cable that when it spins, it creates a circle, and then uh, there's a a launch tube thing in the center of this circle, and then stuff gets launched through centrifugal force. That does not sound like it would be ideal for you know, human occupants, maybe cargo, But I can't imagine going on. Like have you guys ever been to one of those amusement parks like six Flags that has something like the wheelie. It spins horizontally and then

the arm comes up so that you're spinning upside down vertically. Yea, yeah, I can't imagine using that to get into space. I can't imagine using that on the ground. Yeah. I rode one of those. I rode one of those two times in a row once and that was probably one of my greatest failures as as a human being, It was making that decision, because they ruined the rest of the day.

Then they're also proposed magnetic lift systems, but a lot of them would require incredible engineering, like digging forty kilometers down into the ground to create enough runaway. Yeah. For the magnetic thrust, you would need to get up into space, which already non trivial problem. Yeah, so, as you've pointed out, basically all of these are about on the same level as the space elevator. Yeah. They think things that may one day work if we have some technological breakthroughs, but

they may even be practical. Like, even if they work doesn't necessarily mean it's practical, Right, it may end up being where sure it works, but the amount of money and energy or anything else that we pour into it dwarfs whatever a rocket launch would be, thus negating the effectiveness of that technique. Well, I've got another proposal. Proposal, way,

I want to get a little more Wizard of Oz. Okay, Yeah, I don't think that we're paying enough due to technology that was dreamed about in the late eight I got it, I got it. You're gonna say flying monkeys on a flying monkey today. You know how about balloons? You're floating up into space in a balloon, going, I can't sit up, and I don't know how it works. Yeah, that's an

interesting and interesting idea. And the reason why we're even mentioning this, and we'll go into more detail as the episode goes on, is because there are a couple of different companies that have been looking into using balloons as a means of taking people up to high altitudes in what they're calling space tourism. So how realistic is that? How high can balloons go? Can they get us to space? Well?

The Federation Aeronautique into Nacional, which overseas Aeronautic records, defines space as beginning at one hundred kilometers above sea level, which is a little more than sixty two miles, right, That's where space begins, according to that organization. The US Air Force defines it differently, saying that it's fifty miles above sea level, which is a little more than eighty kilometers.

So there's a twenty kilometer difference there, which actually, interestingly enough, has caused some problems because there were some some early test pilots who flew above the fifty mile mark or the eighty kilometer mark, but below the one kilometer mark, So did they earn their astronaut wing or not? And that was actually a big problem for a long time.

Eventually the government said, give him the astronaut wings. Would have been funny if the right right, Yes, you went, you went incredibly high, try again later, but not high enough. So why one kilometers? Well, it's called the Karman line, and at that height the air is so thin that it does not create sufficient lift for an aerodynamical vehicle to maintain flight. Right, So you couldn't take an airplane with wings up there exactly, it would It would not

have any lift. It would start to fall until it reached a denser atmosphere. So, in atmospheric terms, this puts the beginning of space at Earth's thermosphere. But you know, you know your levels of the atmosphere, right, the thermosphere is pretty far out there. That starts at around eighty five kilometers above sea level and ends around the five hundred to one thousand kilometer range, which I know that sounds like it's a huge range. It's five kilometers. How

could it be like so nebulous. Well, it largely depends upon external factors like polder activity. Now, the level above the thermosphere is the exosphere, which is an area that has molecules that are gravitationally bound to the Earth, but they are so far apart from one another that they don't act like a gas. They're all individual particles essentially,

so very very thin layer. Here below the thermosphere is the miso sphere, which is between fifty and eighty kilometers, and then below that is the stratosphere, which is between ten and fifty kilometers, and then below that is the troposphere, which is the lowest level. That's where weather occurs. So those are your basic levels. And when you look at those levels, you might ask, well, where where did the balloons go? Like how high can the balloons go in

that that scale. I'm guessing they can't get you all the way out to the exosphere. You would guess correctly, because balloons, by their nature, are based on the equilibrium between the density of the gas inside the balloon versus what's outside. It floats up because it is less dents than the atmosphere. And then you also have other other factors as well that we'll talk about like air pressure, which becomes really important. Ter On, and the weight of

the material that the balloon is made of also very important. Yeah, and gold balloons just don't go very high. No, but you know what, Adam and Jamie on MythBusters had a lead balloon and they made it float. They can do anything. Did they explode it afterwards? I don't think they did.

Know they shot it with a cow. Yeah. Anyway, So in October two thou fourteen, Alan you Stays, a Google executive, ascended to an altitude of about forty one kilometers, which is about twenty five point five miles before detaching from his balloon. Now that balloon was created by a company, right, Yeah, called Paragon strat X. And you have to make a fist when you say that names which Lauren did both. You know, even when she was explaining that you have

to do that, she did it again. Muscle mass bulk up with dreat haagone stratic and yeah, he he his was interesting, like his his approach was interesting. You know. Felix baum Gartner also had gone very high up. This was this was breaking baum Gartner's unofficial record. Baumgartner's record has not yet been officially recognized by the international organization I mentioned earlier. But baum Gartner went up in a capsule, right,

and then he had a special suit. But he was inside a capsule for most of his ascent, well for his entire ascent, and then got out and jumped out for his descent. You mean he was in a capsule lifted by balloon. Yeah, yeah, yeah, whereas uh Alan here was wearing a special suit and that was kind of what was connected to the balloon. It was kind of neat as opposed to being, you know, inside a bigger thing. His suit was the thing, which is kind of crazy.

That's either scarier or less scary, and I'm not actually sure. And and of course baum Gardeners was very much publicized. It was televised, It was It was amazing if you watched it. You know what I'm talking about the moment when he stepped out on the ledge before jumping out was even for me sitting comfortably at home. Yeah, I was white knuckled. Right whereas our our our friend from Google uh did the jump and then talked about it

barely just he just wanted to do it. Um So the suit he wore that you stay swar was designed specifically so that he could uh explore the stratosphere, so, you know, having the life support systems that would keep him safe at that altitude. His parachute deployed at about eighteen thousand feet, which is about five point five kilometers, and he landed safely. Uh So even the bomb gardners, whose whose ascent, by the way, went up to thirty

nine kilometers or about twenty four miles. Uh you know, both of these numbers, both of these these ascents incredible achievements, phenomenal record breaking achievements. Yeah, way higher than I've gone. Yeah, I've never gone that high either. But if you've been paying attention when I mentioned the earlier different levels of the atmosphere, you'll realize these elevations are not anywhere close

to space. They're well inside the stratosphere, not quite halfway yeah, well below that one kilometers and as you say, less than halfway to that. So they are nowhere close to space, although we often talk about them being taken to the beginning of space. What about weather balloons, how high do they go? Well, it depends upon the construction of the balloon itself, but generally speaking they reach around the same region that bomb Gartner and you stays went to the stratosphere.

So the average heights range from sixty thou feet to a hundred to five thousand feet or eighteen to thirty two kilometers, so they normally actually reach elevations below the ones that bomb Gartner and you see went to, though you can get them higher than that. What about those balloons that you can those little kits that you can buy to tie a camera to and send your camera

into space. Essentially we're talking about the same height as the weather balloons, maybe sometimes lower because generally speaking, you're probably not getting the super thin material balloons because you have to be incredibly careful with that stuff. I mean, it's incredibly delicate. But the reason why they make it so thin and light is to is to maximize the payload that the balloon can carry, so decrease the amount of weight of the balloon itself so it can carry

more of a payload. Um, those camera ones probably are not made the same at the same level as the weather balloons. I'm sure you still have to be very careful with them, but it probably doesn't get quite to

that altitude. The highest elevation reached by any balloon according to what I could find, was fifty three kilometers, which is nearly thirty three miles, which means that balloon actually reached the Miso sphere, so it went above of the stratosphere, above that halfway mark to space, but still well below space itself. And this balloon was released in two thousand two in Japan. It was unmanned obviously, and was made of material that was about one sixth as thick as

your average plastic grocery bag. Wow. Yeah, if you ever watched the the preparations that ballum Gartner had to go through before and ballum Gartner's team really had to go through before the ascent, and you see them slowly laying out the balloon. They are all being incredibly careful because this stuff looks like it's like plastic wrap thin. I mean,

it's incredibly thin. Uh So, one of the reasons they don't go any higher than that, apart from the density issue that Joe brought up, is the air pressure issue. The balloons expand as they go up, there's less and less air pressure, and there's more temper there's higher temperatures that higher elevations. We'll talk more about that in a second too, and the combination of those being the balloon

gets bigger and bigger. So the balloon might be a fairly impressive size at ground level, and then once it gets to the altitude you're planning on it getting to, it's going to be significantly larger. It's going to have expanded quite a bit, probably just about capacity. Yeah, beyond that, you have reached the tensile strength the elasticity of the material, and balloons go pop. I wonder if that's what happens to the balloons that are released at the county fair

and just float up and disappear. How high did those balloons go? I guess it all depends on the size of the balloon the howe, because if there's any kind of leakage, it's gonna start to it's gonna start to descend earlier. Um a lot of them do, I imagine, get to an altitude where they just can't, you know, they can't sustain themselves anymore, and they pop and then

they fall. I totally want to do a brain Stuff episode about this, by the way, it would be pretty cool, all right, that'll be awesome that everyone on YouTube has not already done that. But yeah, you know, I think I think that will be a great episode because again it explains something that a lot of us don't think about about what happens to the balloons, you know, the ones that aren't tethered. What happens to them when they continuously go up and there, if there's no venting mechanism,

what happens? And so it would be a great way of explaining that they go to balloon Heaven. But at any rate, well, hold on a second, why do we start talking about this in the first place. It was because we were investigating the idea of a company using balloons for space tourism. Could someone do something that audacious? Someone is, well, someone's planning on dining at the very least, it hasn't happened quite yet. But there's this company called

Worldview that has has a plot, a terrific balloon plot. UM. So so Worldview purchased paragon strat x Is Balloon technolog g back in UM and their their long term plan here is to start conducting tourism flights via balloon. UM. Passengers would enter a flight capsule attached to a safe football stadium sized balloon that's a significant balloon um, after about an hour and a half of a cent, they would take a two hour tour of near space and then glide down um for first using the balloon and

then with a parafoils help. A parafoil being the same kind of stuff that that that Felix and um you stay stays both bomb Gardner. I'm not on a name basis with bomb Gardner. UM. Uh yeah, yeah, parafoil to kind of glide back down parachute down to earth. Um. They're marketing it as an alternative to a few things to to reduced gravity aircraft flights which are shorter and probably more stressful. That's what we colloquially call the vomit

comet um. And and these days it looks like they're running pretty cheap, like like five to ten grands something like that. Really, yeah, I can't The last time I heard these were still being proposed as many tens of thousands of dollars, and I had seen a couple of years ago, I had seen it as low as twenty which it makes sense to me that the price would continually come down as as businesses could actually make a business of it. Uh. Interesting little tidbit are our head

of creative here at hell stuff works. Jason Hoak has been on the vomit comments. Yes, meanwhile, I'm like, I wrote the article on that and I didn't get to go. But but yeah, so so there's there's those things, and then there's the actual go to space for a couple of days at least space tour tourism kind of things, um, which run you know somewhere between two and fifty thousand and twenty million bucks and and require pretty extensive training. Yeah.

I don't know that there's anywhere currently that's even allowing this to happen. I know the Russian Space program used to and that's where the twenty million was going to. Like people would pay twenty million bucks to get a hitch a ride on the se US right go up to the I S S. But I don't know that they're still doing that. So uh. And I know that, you know, like like virgin is planning on it. The ticket price that they're currently advertising is that two kind

of mark? Um, So it potentially exists. Um, but Worldview is allowing reservations for this balloon flight at about seventy dollars right now, so pretty steep, still pretty expensive, not inexpensive um, but but cheaper than spending a week in space. Okay, And if you are curious about how exactly this is working, it goes something like this. The giant balloon is made of polyethylene that's filled with helium, and helium, as you may or may not know, is a total light element

like no umber two lightest elements ever. Well, why don't they just use the number one lightest element ever? Because that explodes because it burns with explosive force. Um. But at any rate, it is lighter than our our mix of air at sea level pressure certainly um. And so if you put a bit of helium into an air tight, lightweight balloon material, that balloon will float. You have probably seen this in action. I'm assuming if you're listening to

a podcast, you've also seen a balloon. You're right, you've probably been to at least one child's birthday party or you know, any kind of amusement park something where there have been helium balloons present. Because it costs my birthday parties had air filled balloons. That sounds like that episode of the I'm just kidding. We didn't have balloons at all, all right. We just went to a sad place. I'm gonna keep talking about helium, all right, let's do that.

Um So, So, if if you let if you let this healing, if you let this balloon with a little bit of helium in it continue going up, the helium will expand due to um A, the outside pressure decreasing and be the outside temperature increasing, which sounds crazy, right because we all know, like if you're climbing a mountain, you go up those elevations, temperature gets colder and colder

until there's just snow everywhere. Yes, accurate, but that is in the lowest layer of the troposphere close to the Earth. Um the temperature does not always decrease as you ascend due to variables like radiation exposure and chemical stuff happening like like the ozone forum formation. Um it will get hotter the further you go up in both the stratosphere

and the thermosphere. Crazy party times interesting. Um so. So, Worldview's balloon is designed to be fully inflated by this expanding helium when it reaches its target height again efficient see yeah, um to start descending that, the craft will start venting some of that helium until it reaches a good paragliding height, then detach the balloon, let it fly free, join its balloon brethren, or you know, flip back to

the ground where they carefully collected again. Um, and then you know, you glide down on the paraglide as much as three miles away from where you started, because depending on how fast the winds are going that day, how do you get back to your car private plane? Okay, yeah, don't worry. They thought of that, I said, They're not, like, well, see you later. That's where that's there's a good chuck

at that for the valet service. So the thing about this is that sounds like that could be really cool because you would be going up high enough in this capsule to see some of the curvature of the Earth to be higher than people are normally traveling airplane. Probably the star is really clearly, it's probably real pretty, but

that's not exactly space to it's not space. Yeah, So the cruise altitude is just a smidge over a hundred thousand feet, which is about thirty kilometers or nineteen miles um. That whole feet altitude things still drives me nuts. I never understand why anyone says, I'm like I'm like, what does a hundred thousand feet even mean that? Okay, anyway,

anything above sixteen feet and I start having problems. Uh right, So so you know, like we said, the literal edge of space is like a hundred kilometers or sixty two miles or three hundred and twenty seven thousand feet if you want to be pedantic about it. Um and so, yes, a hundred thousand feet is not anywhere near the edge of space. So another question, Okay, do you feel the reduced gravity that we get to experience in the I

s s not not not at all. But there is a bar on board, so you can feel a little bit floaty, right, that's true. Yeah, different, different approach, but you know that we're pragmatist pragmatics. I know I screwed it up as I was saying, and I'm like, Jonathan, seriously, well that's saying in it is Okay, I'm not going to tell you to cut it. Well, then it's suburbian. That's going back to an old tech stuff flood I made years ago. I'm sure the tech stuff fans out

there are appreciating, appreciating the call back. We have not been drinking in the office today, folks, we're just punchy. Well, anyway, taking balloons to space, Okay, so you can't do it now, the balloon would burst before you would get up that high. Is there any way we can use balloons in the exploration of space? Well, I've seen proposals for this, and I've seen some mentions of actual testing, but I haven't seen enough to really give any indication that it's a

viable alternative. But I have seen some suggestions that we use balloons in order to lift a rocket up to a significant altitude before igniting the rocket, thus shortening it's its journey to escape Earth's gravity. And you would therefore reduce the amount of fuel you would need, and that would mean that the cost would be lower. Right, A couple of major problems with this though, Um And by the way, these are these are called raccoon's launched rock. Yeah, raccoons.

I have no idea if that's actually a real term, or if someone out there on the internet is pulling my leg, by the way, and if you are pulling my leg, good on you. So at any rate, this reality making you think of that song Racky raccoon. Yes, I remember that one too. By the Beatles. So there's also this proposal that I had seen a science writer and science fiction writer had had proposed it years ago about it was kind of a vision of the few sure, not so much a proposal, just one of those things

where you know, you project out. I think this was for one. And the writer had described a floating platform held aloft by balloons upon which you could do things like rocket launches. So this platform would float in the stratosphere, and that would mean that you would actually have a floating launch pad. Um so so you have like a plane up to the launch and then a yeah or yeah you would you would have to I guess use cargo.

You couldn't get a plane that high. I guess maybe you could, but I don't know how you would get it unless you were to have the launchpad on the ground. First, assemble everything on the launchpad, then use balloons to lift it to the right altitude, and then launch, because I don't know how you would get the rocket there Otherwise, I I'm worried about lighting large amounts of rocket fuel around combustible gases. Well, and that would depend upon whether

you were using hydrogen or helium. Okay, Okay, I guess, I guess helium is pretty inert. Yeah, But but if you were using a lot of the descriptions I've said, suggested using hydrogen because hydrogen has better lift, but like you point out, that's a real hazard because it is also flammable. So maybe you would incorporate that into the design, where upon launch, the balloon essentially self destructs and then the rocket just goes on past it. But there are

other problems that balloons have. For one, they have limited payload capacity. They cannot carry an unlimited amount of stuff. And you know, obviously the heavier the the object, the more gas you're going to need, the bigger the balloon you need, and that then you start to factor in the weight of the balloon itself. These are issues that you have with rockets, to right, The bigger the rocket you need, the more fuel you need, and the more fuel you have, the more fuel you need to lift

the fuel. And it becomes one of those things where very smart people can work out the math, and I just am sitting there scratching my head. At any rate, um, I was looking at NASA's Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility website, which has a chart that plots altitudes and suspended weight

limits on their various balloons that they have. The heaviest payload that they list is eight thousand pounds for a balloon with thirty four point forty three million cubic feet of volume at about thousand feet, which is about thirty six kilometers. Uh, that's the heaviest. Eight thousand pounds for a rocket is nothing? Right, That's that's incredibly tiny, um say.

And there are other issues too, righte. Helium is expensive, So if you are using helium to lift the rocket up, it is possible that you are counteracting at least some of the savings you would have from the solid fuel or chemical fuel you'd be using for that rocket. Sure. Also, helium is kind of a precious resource. We don't have an unlimited amount of it, and it's really scientifically useful in the experience experiments, experiences that we're we're a thousand,

We're saying so many words. Basically, what I'm saying is that I'm judging you every time you buy your kids helium balloons. Well, and also, I mean, just imagine all the people at the Large Hadron Collide are watching one of these Worldview balloons go up in the air and thinking how many rotations would that have helped us go to I mean, it's it's one of those questions you ask, well, where's the you know, should we should we should we

end up rationing helium for specific uses? Uh? Yeah. And there's another issue too, one that I think is probably the biggest one in my mind. Let's say that you solve these problems that you're using hydrogen because it's relatively easy to manufacture, you figured out a way to to avoid the problems with the fact that hydrogen is combustible. You, um, you don't have to worry about you know, you've got a rocket that's the appropriate size, you're getting to the

height that you want. All that stuff is cool. You still can't really control where the balloon is going to be necessarily, unless you've got a crazy tether on it, it's going to be going in different directions, which means that that's going to affect the rocket trajectory. And I don't know if you've heard the term rocket science, but it suggests a certain level of precision. And if you can't tell where the launch pad is going to be pointed at any given moment, precision is difficult. If not

impossible to achieve. And so while I wouldn't say that it's impossible we'll ever see balloons being used in in some form of launch system, I think there's probably going to be other ways to use balloons in in the space industry, like this near space tourism type stuff, uh, and less in direct launches, although who knows, maybe some engineer will come along and solve all the problems I've mentioned,

and I will eat my words. So I have a question, okay, for you guys, would you rather do one of the suborbital space flights like we were hearing, you know, Virgin Galactic Offering and and that kind of thing, this other idea, or would you rather go up in one of these balloon carried capsules. Good question. You get to spend longer up there obviously in the capsule, or but the suborbital

spaceflight will take you higher, right, yeah? I mean ultimately for me, I think I think the the level of uh interest I have would be vomit comet first, just so I could experience what micro gravity feels like. Uh. Then it would be the balloons because I would I think that being able to see from that altitude and

get that kind of approximation. I mean, I know it's nowhere close to what the astronauts experienced when they were far enough from the Earth where they could see the entire planet, but just that that kind of sense of awe of being able to see so much of the Earth down below me, that would probably be uh, really impactful to me. And then third would be kind of the vision galactic approach. But if you ask me the

same question tomorrow, my order might be totally different. I Uh, I think I think I would go for the balloons first, actually, because it just seems like such a less stressful experience. I'm just picturing myself having a really hard time enjoying the glee of weightlessness because I'm like, oh, we're really high. Oh we're really high. Oh we're going so fast. Oh I don't like this. Oh I don't like this. Like that,

that's what I imagine myself doing the whole time. You're not a fan of air travel to begin with, I'm okay with it. The more that I learned about the physics behind it, the more nervous it makes me. I'm like, that doesn't sound right at all. How is this even a thing that I think we're just playing a trick on physics, and once it finds out, it's gonna be mad. It's gonna be like in the road Runner cartoons. While Coyote finally looks, you have just enough time to pull

out the sign that says yype and then you plummet. Yeah. But but no, no, I mean, I mean all of it. I mean, obviously, if I had the opportunity to do any of those three, if someone like Tomorrow is like, hey, you get your choice, Uh, I'd be like all of them. Yeah. Yeah, What about you, Joe, I don't know. I honestly don't know. You ask a question of us and you don't have

an answer for yourself. I guess I would today. I'd probably actually go for the balloon, you know, because while I guess you can say you've been higher in the suborbital spaceflight the balloon, you'd have more time to enjoy it. Yeah. I also like the idea that you are able to enjoy a cocktail or two and just kind of take it all in. I also love thee I love the idea of hacking the the p A system so it just plays my beautiful balloon on the loop for the

entire time you're up there. Can you imagine the up charges on those cocktails? Yeah? Well, at any rate. Uh, you know, it's an interesting and interesting take on space tourism.

And certainly until we solve these problems of making making getting to space less expensive and more reliable and less dangerous, then creative solutions like these are going to have to fill in for those of us who really want to get as close to that experience as possible, unless, you know, we just settle for like a simulation, or we dedicate our lives to training and becoming an astronaut, which if you're doing that, that's awesome. I you know, I've gone

too far. I'm beyond that that range. Now there's no amount of training that would ever get me ready to go in space like that. Well not with that attitude. Well, I'm still waiting from Mars one to call me back. So you know, I wanted to get on that alternate list. If we work out reverse aging, then yeah, yeah, that would be great, Yeah, because then I would totally get

on board. Yeah, this has been really kind of an interesting thing to look at, and this was all kind of brought to our attention because we saw a little news item about the proposed plan of using balloons to take people on kind of a space tourism approach, and

we thought, well, let's look into that more. If you guys have suggestions for future topics, maybe there's something that you've always wanted to know, how is that going to work in the future, Or maybe you just you know, there's a there's a science fiction film that depicts the future in a particular way, and you want to know what we think that. Does our vision of the future stack up against that one? Any question like that, feel free to ask. We love getting messages from you guys.

We have lots of more listener Maile episodes in the works for the near future, so keep an ear out to that, and remember you can get in touch with us with the email address fw Thinking at how Stuff Works dot com, or drop us a line on Facebook, Twitter or Google Plus. At Twitter and Google Plus, we are f w Thinking. Just search fu Thinking and Facebook will pop right up. Leave us a message multi again. Really see for more on this topic in the future

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