balloon story

BRUTALITOPS

on indefiniate mod break
Contributor
sure everyone has seen it on tv now

Pretty sure the kid is dead.

way to represent colorado damocles
 
This was surreal. However, since the family was on "Wife Swap" my knee-jerk reaction is that this is a hoax and they sent the kid over to Grandma's place for the day.

That was one cool balloon though.

BTW - We don't get to watch news at work... so It was amazing that I even knew what you were talking about. One of the other Manglers had it up on CNN.com.
 
a 6 year old could definitely fit in that compartment.

It's not a matter of fitting in the stupid compartment. It's a matter of getting enough lift from a balloon no bigger than a few trash bags.

As soon as I find out the size of the balloon I'll do the math.
 
It's not a matter of fitting in the stupid compartment. It's a matter of getting enough lift from a balloon no bigger than a few trash bags.

As soon as I find out the size of the balloon I'll do the math.

It was circular, 20 feet across, and with the little basket on the bottom, a total of five feet high.
 
It was circular, 20 feet across, and with the little basket on the bottom, a total of five feet high.

That's about 1300 square feet of balloon volume by my rough calculation.

You need 4445.454545454545 grams of helium to lift a 60 lb kid. Someone figure out how much that comes out to volumetrically in Denver (high alt). It's going to be huge.
 
The math works out. I stand corrected. A 20 foot balloon filled with helium at normal alt would give you a couple hundred lbs of lift.
 
It's not a matter of fitting in the stupid compartment. It's a matter of getting enough lift from a balloon no bigger than a few trash bags.

As soon as I find out the size of the balloon I'll do the math.

that I can see. on that thought also, IF the kid fell out of it, wouldn't that just make the balloon continue to rise?
 
i thought you were all about science? you should approve of those parents teaching their kids about science at such an early age.

This isn't science. This is pseudoscience. Bullshit that parades around as if it's science. They wanted to find magnetic fields in hurricanes, but apparently had little understanding of magnetism or storms, and no reason to believe a physical mechanism existed to provide such a link. They basically just guessed. They searched for extraterrestrials. That's pseudoscience, pop science, not science.
 
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