[757labs] Balloon Record

[Eric Gearhart]

On Mon, Oct 24, 2011 at 11:01 AM, Angus Hines <3aih at angushines.com> wrote:
> They were at 119K last time I checked yesterday and somewhere over WARSAW
> !!!

I wonder if there's some "barrier" at a certain altitude where the air
gets so thin that it makes it really, really difficult to get past a
certain altitude... sort of like the sound barrier. If I remember
right, when they were first trying to break the sound barrier,
turbulence and whatnot really ramps up as you get close... this was
the big problem back in the late 1940s/early 1950s:

"The term, which occasionally has other meanings, came into use during
World War II, when a number of aircraft started to encounter the
effects of compressibility, a collection of several unrelated
aerodynamic effects that "struck" their planes like an impediment to
further acceleration. By the 1950s, new aircraft designs routinely
"broke" the sound barrier."

--
Eric