• FlexibleToast@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      People have a terrible understanding of orbital mechanics and apparent weightlessness. It’s not like gravity just stops affecting you after you get out of the atmosphere. Getting out of the atmosphere is the easy part of getting to orbit. Going sideways fast enough is the hard part.

        • Rakonat@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          I used to baby sit a friend’s kid when he was a wee lad, frankly we spent most time playing KSP. Used to give him challenges like if he could build a ship using x amount of parts and make orbit would let him order out pizza instead of food his mom prepared for us. He rarely succeeded at first but apparently kept at it long after I stopped mentoring him and apparently is now going to school to be an aerospace engineer. And before all that his mom could never get him to do his math homework as a tyke.

  • carl_dungeon@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    This is dumb as shit. Hot air balloons only go so high, less than 70k feet according to records. They only stay aloft if the heat is continually applied, if not, air cools and they sink. They move with the air, and the air moves with the planet.

    This doesn’t work for the same reason jumping in an airplane doesn’t slam you into the back wall.

      • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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        9 months ago

        If you go much higher the balloon will leak heat through black body radiation faster than you’ll be able to heat it. And even if you insulated the balloon in a way that didn’t add too much weight you’d eventually get to the top of the atmosphere and hot air balloons won’t go into space because they don’t have any propulsion systems.

        If you fill it with helium, it will go into space, and then it will immediately explode.