When you think of NASA and crashes, you think of things like this:
But, you usually don’t think about government balloon crashes being “dramatic”, unless of course it’s a balloon crash in Roswell, NM in 1947.
Watch this video from Australia’s ABC:
A huge NASA balloon loaded with a telescope painstakingly built to scan the sky at wavelengths invisible to the human eye crashed in the Australian outback Thursday, destroying the astronomy experiment and just missing nearby onlookers, according to Australian media reports.
In dramatic video released by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), the giant 400-foot (121-meter) balloon is seen just beginning to lift its payload, then the telescope gondola appears to unexpectedly come loose from its carriage. The telescope crashes through a fence and overturn a nearby parked sport utility vehicle before finally stopping.
Video via Space.com/Yahoo News:
Fortunately, nobody was hurt, but as you can see in the video, it was a close call.
h/t to Steve Goddard
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Oops. Guess they weren’t as sucessful as the guy who sent his digital camera up 35mi. in a balloon.
Oops!
In Fort Collins, people know how to launch balloons in high winds. But they hide the payload in the attic.
Unexpected strong winds and they *launched*? That sounds like the action of a bunch of amateurs.
On the plus side, nobody was hurt, and, judging by the orange and white stripes, the recovery parachute can still serve as a small circus tent…
rbateman, I did a better job flying my cell phone:
And really, if it wasn’t for AGW and Manmade Climate Change the winds wouldn’t have been so strong!!! So don’t blame NASA.
(It is increasingly difficult to take NASA seriously, which is a travesty.)
See here how it is done.
The Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility (re-named to memorialize the shuttle) launches balloons with payloads of up to four tons. The largest balloons, made of a film about the thickness and appearance of what your dry-cleaning comes back in, have a surface area of up to four acres. Technicians on the ground track the balloon/payload as far away as 300 miles before they’re blocked by the curvature of the Earth.
Specially designed balloons have floated above Anarctica for close to eight weeks collecting valuable scientific data much like, and greatly cheaper than, a satellite, space station or shuttle experiment. Most of the time, the payloads, which can cost millions and take years to build, can easily be recovered with little or no damage.
Comparing high altitude research ballooning to some guy who straps a cell-phone to a camera and sends it up on a weather balloon is, IMHO, stupid.
The US missile program didnt get on track until they set Werner von Braun and his crew on the job.
Now Werner et. al. has gone into history, and they have trouble even launching a balloon.
hehe.
I can hear the AGWers now proclaiming the launch was a success because an SUV was destroyed.
T. Paul:
Take a deep breath, relax, maybe say your mantra a few times.
Then repeat after me: not everything posted on the internet is supposed to be taken literally. Not everything posted on the internet is supposed to be taken literally. Not everything posted on the internet is supposed to be taken literally!
Anyway… bottom line here is, it doesn’t matter what your experience is, if you screw up that bad you’re going to get laughed at. That WAS a screw-up. Do you know how I can tell that was a screw-up? By watching someone’s TRUCK getting turned over! Heck, a Space Shuttle hasn’t turned someone’s truck over since what, 1983?
Comparing high altitude research ballooning to some guy who straps a cell-phone to a camera and sends it up on a weather balloon is, IMHO, stupid.
Yeah. The guy with the cell phone and camera balloon actually succeeds.
@ur momisugly kwik says: April 29, 2010 at 12:49 pm
“The US missile program didnt get on track until they set Werner von Braun and his crew on the job.”
The State Library in Tasmania has a copy of Werner von Braun’s autobiography. The inscription on the frontispiece reads: “My aim is the stars”.
Underneath someone pencilled: “But mostly hit London”.
🙂
Given that the NASA engineers have learned their latest tricks at Al Gore’s knee, it is not surprising that the wind was blowing so hard.
I watched that on the TV news last night. Hilarious!
NASA should be abolished. All of it. Lock stock and barrel. It is just pork and a hi tech jobs for the dole program.
I say this as a long time supporter of spaceflight, peopled or not and the sight of a ship lifting for space brings tears to my eyes every time while missiles have no effect.
I have other knowledge of NASA’s incompetence. On Steve Fossett’s glider altitude record it was my gear that proved that they got into the stratosphere when the NASA instrument package failed. There’s more to that too that doesn’t make NASA look good.
OT NEWS: Oh, Mann: Cuccinelli targets UVA papers in Climategate salvo
Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli …. may be preparing a legal assault on an embattled proponent of global warming theory who used to teach at the University of Virginia, Michael Mann.
In papers sent to UVA April 23, Cuccinelli’s office commands the university to produce a sweeping swath of documents relating to Mann’s receipt of nearly half a million dollars in state grant-funded climate research conducted while Mann— now director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State— was at UVA between 1999 and 2005.
http://www.readthehook.com/blog/index.php/2010/04/29/oh-mann-cuccinelli-targets-uva-papers-in-climategate-salvo/
Ah, that was the Nuclear Compton Telescope.
Abstract of “Performance of the Nuclear Compton Telescope” detailing an earlier launch:
Here is info about a successful 2009 flight with an in-depth description of the NCT (final version?).
And finally the NCT’s home page. Enjoy!
Dr Carol Rosin has interesting stories about VVB
“Von Braun’s purpose during the last years of his life, his dying years, was to educate the public and decision-makers about why space-based weapons are dumb, dangerous, destabilizing, too costly, unnecessary, unworkable, and an undesirable idea, and about the alternatives that are available.”
But there are trillions of dollars to be made Dr Braun, trillions I tell you!
“The strategy that Wernher Von Braun taught me was that first the Russians are going to be considered to be the enemy. In fact, in 1974, they were the enemy, the identified enemy. We were told that they had “killer satellites”. We were told that they were coming to get us and control us-that they were “Commies.”
Then terrorists would be identified, and that was soon to follow. We heard a lot about terrorism. Then we were going to identify third-world country “crazies.” We now call them Nations of Concern. But he said that would be the third enemy against whom we would build space-based weapons.
The next enemy was asteroids. Now, at this point he kind of chuckled the first time he said it.
Asteroids- against asteroids we are going to build space-based weapons.
And the funniest one of all was what he called aliens, extraterrestrials. That would be the final scare. And over and over and over during the four years that I knew him and was giving speeches for him, he would bring up that last card. “And remember Carol, the last card is the alien card. We are going to have to build space-based weapons against aliens and all of it is a lie.””
Does this mean that Australian climate “problems” are ballooning?
Glad no one was hurt, of course.
My favorite foulup is still crashing a very expensive probe into Mars because they forgot to make the conversion from metric to ‘merican.
Which instrument project was this? Any links to the Nasa or partners web site?
If Richard Heene was in charge of this project, they would have a successful launch, the payload would have been delivered safely, and the flight would have been covered live by every news agency on the planet.
There are two words I never want to hear again,
as long as I live.
unexpected/ly
robust
I can only think of one picture:
http://sledpress.files.wordpress.com/2009/10/drawing-board1.jpg
The place has had sight seeing balloons crash previously. It is a place where low level jet streams and downslopes winds over the nearby w to e orientated ranges are common at night and early in the morning. I have published a met paper on the downslope wind effects togther with 2 other guys back in the 90’s in the Australian Met Mag. I would have thought that they would have sent up a trial small belloon to test for such conditions before inflating the huge experiment costly one!
So what would happen if YOUR organization was designated as THE MOST professional and knowledgeable at predicting events of a particular kind, even on a global basis far into the future…. And then you destroyed a few million dollars worth equipment because you failed to predict or anticipate a relatively common local event of the same kind?
Yeah, not really a fair comparison but I’ll bet someone would be fired and as said above, lucky no one was hurt. And it’s a real shame every time a few million dollars worth of my taxes go “up” in a big ball of dust. Oh well, soon there wont be any more to take.