- Jun 23, 2009
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- 13
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Robin'sBrood :
Wombat, he looks like a pretty small 6 year old too. My tall but skinny 8 year old daughter only weighs 50 lbs... figure the 6 year old might weight about 40-45 lbs or so... ??
Yeah, but:
I'm over-estimating the volume ... the balloon looks kinda lozenge shaped and I'm too lazy to try to figure out the volume of that, so I guessed at a cylinder, which would have a much higher volume than a balloon shaped like the one in the pic.
You'd have to lift the ballon, the plywood box, and whatever they used to strap the balloon to the box, and the kid as well.
That box looked rather large ... so the plywood is going to take up a lot of the payload weight. If that box and the straps and the balloon together weigh 50 lbs and the kid weighs 40, it just might get off the ground with 1500 cubic feet of gas, but that lozenge shaped balloon would hold less gas than a cylindrical one of the same diameter.
They also said it was 20' across on the news, but it looked somewhat smaller in pictures. Smaller = less gas = less lift.
My guess from the photo and the description is that it would not have had the payload capacity, but I could be over-estimating the weight of that plywood box or misjudging the size of the balloon.
Wombat, he looks like a pretty small 6 year old too. My tall but skinny 8 year old daughter only weighs 50 lbs... figure the 6 year old might weight about 40-45 lbs or so... ??
Yeah, but:
I'm over-estimating the volume ... the balloon looks kinda lozenge shaped and I'm too lazy to try to figure out the volume of that, so I guessed at a cylinder, which would have a much higher volume than a balloon shaped like the one in the pic.
You'd have to lift the ballon, the plywood box, and whatever they used to strap the balloon to the box, and the kid as well.
That box looked rather large ... so the plywood is going to take up a lot of the payload weight. If that box and the straps and the balloon together weigh 50 lbs and the kid weighs 40, it just might get off the ground with 1500 cubic feet of gas, but that lozenge shaped balloon would hold less gas than a cylindrical one of the same diameter.
They also said it was 20' across on the news, but it looked somewhat smaller in pictures. Smaller = less gas = less lift.
My guess from the photo and the description is that it would not have had the payload capacity, but I could be over-estimating the weight of that plywood box or misjudging the size of the balloon.
