Science Earthwinds Transglobal Balloon

[Lunar_Lander]

I wanted to ask whether anybody still knows the Earthwinds Transglobal Balloon by Larry Newman. He made five attempts to circle the globe with it in 1992-1995, but all of these attempts failed for various reasons. The main idea was that a helium balloon can only fly as long it still has ballast on-board. To have "unlimited" ballast, Newman attached a balloon full of cold air to his normal balloon, thus having a "ballast balloon" which could be emptied to loose weight or filled with a compressor to increase weight again. The balloon looked like this (this is a test flight):

In the end, the three actual flights (Attempts #2, 4 and 5) all failed due to problems with that ballast balloon. I found a quote by Newman, where he said that Earthwinds was more difficult to fly than the Space Shuttle. Do you think his design could still be used for long-range balloon flights? Or can we say that it won't work?

 

[Sky Captain]

I`m wondering how it was supposed to work. For air in ballast balloon to cause any ballast effect it has to be colder than ambient air. Was there some sort of air conditioning that continuously cooled air in ballast balloon?

 

[Bj]

I`m wondering how it was supposed to work. For air in ballast balloon to cause any ballast effect it has to be colder than ambient air. Was there some sort of air conditioning that continuously cooled air in ballast balloon?

It must have been a cooler... there can be no other way.

Still though, interesting design. Though I imagine they figured water was a easier source of ballast, rather than cold air... and it would be easier to land with water as ballast.

 

[Lunar_Lander]

Newman actually had the idea for this design when he heard of a FAI rule, that allows a balloon to take water or air on-board for ballast and not count that as a landing.

I assume that there has been a cooling system, because on the fourth attempt, also called Earthwinds 2, the landing was forced because a valve in the ballast balloon froze. From what I know for sure was that the air in the balloon was pressurized and there was a compressor for re-filling the balloon.

---------- Post added 03-23-10 at 08:23 PM ---------- Previous post was 03-22-10 at 11:35 PM ----------

I actually found something interesting: Tim Lachenmeier, the man who designed Earthwinds split with Newman in 1994 because of an argument and then went on to plan a new balloon with Joe Kittinger and several Russian people (Which led Newman to get his final balloons from Winzen Research instead from Raven Industries).

In that new design, a cold air balloon encloses the helium balloon. Lachenmeier said that he would have had built Earthwinds this way, but they had no data on the reliability and durability of the "Spectra" fabric of the ballast balloon. But this new project, called WindStar never got off the ground.

http://www.nytimes.com/1994/06/07/s...ie-to-be-first-around-world.html?pagewanted=2