Ultra-Long Duration Balloons

I get this email Oxford English Dictionary people every day. Appropriately called the Fact of the Day, it's a snippet from one of their fine online research tools.

I subscribed to the OED online for three months about five years ago. It's awesome, totally addictive and far too expensive for me to maintain. And being Oxford, they have even more searchable research tomes available and they use the Fact of the Day emails to pimp the stuff.

So this one, "Ultra-Long Duration Balloon" A Dictionary of Space Exploration. Ed. E. Julius Dasch. Oxford University Press 2005. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. 6 September 2008 is all about these ridiculous silver pumpkins that are used to study outer space from right on the edge.



They operate (in theory) above 99% of the atmosphere but in practice they seem to have trouble clearing he first 10%. The years of the events in the citation surprised me because I figured such balloons would date back to the 1960s or even 1950s, but as late as 2003 they couldn't get one to stay up for 12 hours (designed to fly for at least 100 hours).

I guess this means sounding rockets still have their place. They won't hang at the edge of the atmosphere for hundreds of hours, but they get there.