Research Balloon Crash in Australia - UPDATE.

Bill Brown responded to my request early this morning, on the balloon "Near Space" crash in Australia. Bill Brown is a good friend on mine and is the VP of High Altitude Research Corp. Bill works at NASA Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, where he also conducts "Near Space" balloon satellites on a regular basis providing space related data, research and development for NASA. As well as "BalloonSat" experiments for various commercial companies and universities. He stated the best information could be found "STRATOCAT" hyperlink along with very detail video of the actually crash. He said it was a very traumatic crash .

Reports had indicated that another launch for the HERO or High Energy Replicated Optic Telescope that was developed by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center was scheduled however now all operations of future launches would have to be put on hold for the time being while an full investigation was conducted on exactly what happened.

Experts first speculations on what happened include that the winds were just too strong for the launching. Another problem that was stated that the alignment may have been off and therefore adding to the wind disturbance of the launch. As well as the balloon itself appears to not have reached the required balance in order to actually achieve proper lift, it requires a lot of helium in order for the extremely large payload to reach "Near Space", it looked as though the balloon actually positioned itself in front of the payload before it achieved proper alignment for liftoff and this caused the balloon to actually rip the payload right off the launch pad.

Although it is not truly known as of yet all the particulars of the exact causes of the crash, the actually crash was well covered by new media and people can view for themselves the crash and the immense devastation that it caused to the multi-million dollar equipment.

NASA "BalloonSat" experiments are extremely vital in many different forms of research and although the catastrophic crash will most likely cause a delay in future projects it will not halt them completely. The data that is gathered is extremely beneficial in all forms of research and this type of research is too valuable not to continue once the investigation has been finalized.

For more history information and complete details on stratospheric balloon flights view "STRATOCAT."

References for this article include: www.physorg.com/news191742850.html

www.spacedaily.com/reports/Giant_NASA_balloon_crashes_in_Australia_999.html