Space Balloon

Last August, a guy from Brooklyn, NY, and his son, launched a balloon that reach  an altitude of 17 miles (100,000 feet). That's high enough to see the blackness of space, and the curvature of the earth.  They did this for about $1000.00...think about that for a mere thousand bucks, they reached near space.  Virgin Space will  charge you $250,000.00 for the same thing.    Here's  video and a link to the site for much longer video.


Homemade Spacecraft from Luke Geissbuhler on Vimeo.


Amazing what an American can do, yet NASA has prevented us from reaching there for 4 decades.  My father designed space suits and life support systems for first, the Air Force, then later for NASA.  He insisted to the end of his life that Kennedy's cancelling Project Dyna-Soar pushed back a viable manned space station by 20 years. 

Artists renderof of re-entry.

He always thought that instead of going to the moon, we should have taken a smaller step of building a permanent station that would serve as a way point to the Moon, Mars and beyond.