karl3＠writeme.com wrote:
wondering if we could launch into space using balloons
is there some vague way this could be done?
[....
what if there were a _lot_ of balloons? would it help?
thinking ... the more balloons there are, it's like having a more massive object (the displaced air) pushing the balloons upward!
sadly, objects that are more massive do not fall faster, so with very simple intuition it's possible that more balloons wouldn't help ...
how about this: we have a huge hydrogen balloon. _huge_. it rockets up until air approaches the density of hydrogen (needs some way to off-gas or expand). then we burn the excess hydrogen to go the rest of the way! i guess we'd burn the offgassing too but then there's no point to the balloon :s :s we could just burn hydrog--