@@Hans-gb4mv at that altitude, should anything go wrong, the passengers will instantly pass out due to the lack of oxygen or freeze into an icicle due to the extreme low temperature. When Felix Baumgartner, aka the Fearless Felix, jumped from 135000 feet back to the ground, he was in an air-tight fully pressurized suit that's similar to a space suit. He is also a professional skydiver and went through extensive training for that jump. A untrained person on a tourist ballon will die so quickly in this situation and parachute or not isn't gonna save him.
And they poo poo spacex for being overly expensive at 55 million, but deceptively dont say that its for actual orbit and to the ISS, also flash the headline not giving you time to read that its for 3 people! which is incredibly cheap!!!
The curvature isn't that pronounced at 100k ft. You would really have to be much higher for it to be obvious. They're exaggerating here when they say you can see the curvature. And Flat Earthers might also argue that they are just seeing the "edge of the circle" or something. They're about as bright as Trumpies.
@@johnsmithe4656yeah so why do they argue that you can see curvature on planes, even pilots stick with that story, I’m not a flat earther or spherical, really doesn’t matter to me, we’re still stuck in earth regardless
@@RX-8GT First, most pilots aren't going up to 100k ft, they are going up to around 30k ft. Same as a passenger airliner. Second, I have talked with pilots and when the subject has come up they say that you need to be in LEO basically to see the curvature clearly. There are actually formulas you can plug numbers into and figure out what your horizon will be and whether you can see curvature from that altitude. It's math. You can do it if you really care. All I know is that the Earth is huge, and you have to get pretty much into Space (not 100k ft) before you can see the whole shebang.
@@johnsmithe4656 SR-71 crews and U-2 pilots have said they could see the curvature of the earth at 80,000 and 70,000 ft respectively. These balloons are supposed to go to 100,000 ft. Also, I've seen video from amateur balloon flights to similar altitudes and you can definitely see the curvature. Here's an example: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-SdgJMJv_5AM.html
That female spokesperson sounds a little sleazy. She states that hydrogen is so safe, even though it's highly flammable. Her stating balloons are perfectly safe is a little Disingenuous.
Keep in mind, the Hindenburg was coated with a super flammable skin. Most of the fire you see in the crash was not from the hydrogen, but from the diesel fuel... the burning hydrogen rose up into the air. The hydrogen only burned because it mixed with air (in these balloons, the hydrogen doesn't mix with the outside air). And even in the Hindenburg disaster, two thirds of the people survived. Oh, and the Hindenburg was not designed to use hydrogen... it was designed to use helium, but the United States refused to sell helium to the nazis so they had to switch to hydrogen. Had it been floated with helium, the disaster would not have happened at all. She does sound like she wants to hand wave away any dangers, though. All that said, it's still probably a lot safer than strapping yourself to a big tank of liquid methane and oxygen and lighting the candle.
You drive around in a device that propels itself by creating explosions siphoning a tank of a highly flammable accelerant. We call it perfectly safe all the time. This is not much different. Her arguments for not using Helium was the sleazy part.
@dwerg85 That's not really the same thing is it, She is talking about a bag of hydrogen gas. Hydrogen will never be as safe as helium, but with helium, you do lose some of your lifting capability.
"We've been to the Antarctic, we've gone on a Safari..." LMAO, who the hell is she talking about? Gotta be rich people because no remotely normal person has done or ever will do anything like that!!
@@erwina4738 oh boy, only upper middle class can afford to go to these places. A trip to Antarctica costs $15,000 minimum. A safari would be more affordable with $6000. Any regular middle class cannot afford these holidays especially with the cost of living now.
@@martinebon4333 True mostly upper middle class, BUT middle class too if they have savings, and built up assets such as a stock/crypto/bond portfolio. It just depends on their financial situation. But in regards to OP, normal people are upper middle class too lol
“We’d be using 1/3 of a % of the global helium supply” So 1/300th of the total helium supply. Seems rather substantial for a single company just starting out. What if this becomes more popular. That’s a lot of helium
total helium supply. Now use your brain for two seconds, and ask. if they use more helium, and the price goes up, what happens to the total supply of helium
Nah, as long as the material doesn’t seep out of the balloon some how the helium is totally reusable and can be re compressed into a canister again and again.
Hey honey, I have an idea. Let's take that 3/4 of a mil we have stashed in the cookie jar for this year's vacation and take the kids on a space balloon ride for a few hours!!!😂
Even tho I feel like this is a Oceangate thing waiting to happen. Your post is like you are some1 who won a million dollars then you go and buy a million dollar car and later to complain about how expensive it is to service it.
Technically, we are in space already, just stuck on a single planet. But in common and legal parlance, "space" is anything and anywhere beyond Earth, at a minimum of 100 kilometers up.
100,000 ft has been the standard for being considered Space for decades. Look at the X-15 program and how many of those pilots are considered to be astronauts because of the altitudes they achieved during their test flights.
@@Dan-ms4ln Actually you can. NASA has sent balloons as high as 160,000 feet but that's considered about the upper limit for a balloon. And you can't go higher because there's not enough atmospheric pressure to keep the helium inside the balloon. It would pop.
This is a great idea and toyally safe, I don't see how this could go wrong at all, this will work perfectly, it's not like the balloon could burst accidentaly sending its passangers to their deaths, or the onboard systems could fail and have the passangers float away into outer space, or the balloon coiuld burst into flames and incinerate everything, it's not like any of that could happen at all, at, all, this will just work. End sarcasm.
I wish I had the problem of having visited too many places around the world the only option is space. Its hard to find the time and money to just travel out of state. Some people really have too much time and money.
Exactly! 😂.. bruh I’m still exploring this world. This shows there groups of people living a wayy different thrill life to most people and this is a stretching it.
Sigh. That's not how science works. The ballon and capsule will never raise high enough to reach orbit or space. Otherwise we wouldn't need rockets to launch satellites or go to the ISS. Think!
Wonka's Glass Elevator. What if someone pops the ballon? What contingencies are there for a Fall? <a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="780">13:00</a> well, I hope those parachutes are strong AF. War will come to space too.
<a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="233">3:53</a> "outside the capsule its essentially a vacuum" Ok, that's exaggerated. They realize that balloons don't work well in vacuum, right? Sounds like some salesmanship here. Not really a vacuum, not really space imo.
I see a new Stockton Rush business model for billionaire tourism, and if us plebs are fortunate, with the same outcomes. What do you call giant spaceflight pod with like 2000 billionaires on board that crashes? It's the old lawyer joke punch line, "A good start".
Income inequality in future: + Lower middle class vacations in these balloons + Middle middle class vacations in the low earth orbit stations + Upper middle class vacations on the moon + Rich vacation on Mars
Actually to cut costs so we can not tax the rich any more than a street sweeper, FAA went to point to point air traffic control, this lets planes go wherever they want all over the sky, creating a safe zone for ballon to go up and land isn't like in the old days when most flights were in corridors. As planes will need to avoid an area 100's of miles across since these are uncontrolled flights subject to stratospheric winds easily over 50 mph, and last all day, 1,000's of commercial jet liners and their 10,000's of customers are going to face longer flight times, which will no doubt be a surprise to virtually all of them. Sorry folks our flight time today will include and extra 20 mins so all of you w family, car service waiting, all of you racing to a meeting, you in 15l with the new heart for that poor kid, hope everyone can handle the wait. Got to keep it in perspective, we can't expect a dozen of our most important top percent to miss blowing an employees entire annual salary on a joy ride to the stratosphere can we.
I'd put it on my bucket list. Going up into the stratosphere in a huge balloon is much safer than thinking you can go to the bottom of the ocean in a carbon-fiber submersible. The only problem that I see is that helium is surprisingly hard to find on Earth.
The Balloons don’t get as high as orbit, but you can see the curvature of the Earth. There are no Gs to push you back in your seat on the way to the Stratosphere, but when you get there, it is as dark as Outerspace. I wonder when someone will try to launch into space from balloons in the Stratosphere. I wrote a book where a family took a plane to an orbital launch mount held by blimps where a Space Jet took them to The Moon and to Mars…
I dunno about this. The winds aloft are not gentle. The gondola does not appear to have a propulsion system for maneuvering in the horizontal plane. So, how does the balloon stay out of lanes used by airliners or military operations areas (MOA) or prohibited areas?
They have a parachute. But... the Hydrogen people. Just asking for a disaster. Helium guy who was like we want to do a few more years of testing before manned missions even tested hydrogen, but it went boom.
Just one question how do you get back to the landing area and will it have a backup parachute. And what if it lands back on mountain area slamming against cliff face in strong winds of it does loose control. Make video on what safety features and rescue plans you have in place then you might more interested people.
Much more practical then taking a rocket to space. There isn't a market for going to space by rocket to make it profitable. That industry is going to die.
Why not? Other things on my bucket list, but this ... Why not? Ever go up the CN Tower? That elevator ride is awesome. Even flying in a hot air balloon is a unique experience, I've been told.