Twenty-four centuries ago in ancient Greece, Archimedes, bathing in a bathtub, grasped the principle of buoyancy. A hundred years later, ignorant of Archimedes and his revelations, the Chinese were making mini hot-air balloons out of eggshells and paper. Fifteen hundred years later in England, Roger Bacon was proposing that a larger version of the Chinese globe lantern might be possible using thin-walled copper globes filled with ethereal air.

Religious scholars got involved in the quest for flight in the 17th and 18th centuries. Francis Lana, a Jesuit priest, proposed a flying boat lifted by vacuum balloons, also made out of copper. Bartolomeu Laurenco de Gusmao, a Brazilian priest, made models of hot air balloons that impressed the King of Portugal.

Professional launch team members from the National Scientific Balloon Facility (NSBF) prepare to launch a research balloon from Aggie Memorial Stadium. DARREN PHILLIPS

It wasn’t until 1783 that the Montgolfier brothers in Paris demonstrated the first full-size hot-air balloon, made of fabric and paper. In that same year, Jacques Alexander Charles flew to 3,000 feet and travelled 16 miles in the first hydrogen balloon flight. When his balloon landed in the French countryside, ill-informed farmers attacked it with their pitchforks. According to a Paris journal at the time, “the creature, shaking and bounding, dodged the first blows. Finally, however, it received a mortal wound, and collapsed with a long sigh.”

Since then, balloons have been used for fun, sport, competition, business and even war.

When Paris was surrounded by the occupying Prussian army in 1870-71, balloons were used to carry mail and dignitaries safely out of the city.

By 1978, successful Albuquerque businessmen Ben Abruzzo and Maxie Anderson had flown the first balloon across the Atlantic.

But the most impressive balloons today are those coming out of our own Physical Science Laboratory.

Since the 1960s, scientists from NASA’s National Scientific Balloon Facility (NSBF) have launched over 2,000 scientific balloons from all over the world. New Mexico State’s Physical Science Laboratory (PSL) has held the contract to operate and maintain the facility since 1987. NASA balloons are made of a thin polyethylene material that is about the same thickness as sandwich wrap. Balloons up to 60 million cubic feet in volume and 600 feet in diameter have been launched from the permanent site in Palestine, Texas, and various remote sites including Canada, Brazil, Australia, New Zealand, Antarctica, Argentina and India. When fully inflated, these balloons are taller than a 60-story building and can carry a payload weighing as much as 8,000 pounds, about the weight of three small cars. The payload is scientific equipment that gathers information for researchers on the ground.

A research balloon rises out of Aggie Memorial Stadium as part of a balloon launch demonstration put on by the National Scientific Balloon Facility.

“It is basic research that expands our knowledge of the earth and the universe,” said Danny Ball, site manager at NSBF. Research includes cosmic ray astronomy, high energy astrophysics, upper atmospheric research, solar physics, cosmic microwave background astronomy and infrared astronomy.

“We enjoy about a 90 percent overall mission success rate,” Ball said. “One of the beauties of the program is that if a balloon or instrument fails, the payload can be recovered and flown again.”

The payload is usually recovered, but there was one instance where it had the unfortunate luck of landing in Texas at night.

“It landed in a rancher’s corral, which he had closed up the night before,” Ball said. “The payload looked like the Lunar Lander and it landed upright in perfect condition. The aircraft crew could not see the impact because it was dark so they got a motel room, intending to go out and recover it the next day. The rancher comes out the next morning and sees a ‘space ship’ sitting right in the middle of his locked corral. He got his shotgun and blasted holes in it.”

It would appear that Texan and French country people have much in common.

Among the newest balloon technology and the future of the balloon program is the Ultra-Long Duration Balloon (ULDB). This is a pumpkin-shaped super-pressure balloon designed to dwell up to 100 days in near space. It can lift a payload of 6,000 pounds to about 110,000 feet. “

A 100-day balloon mission can come close to doing the same science as a satellite experiment, at a small fraction of the cost,” Ball said.

PSL continues to advance in balloon exploration and technology, and was recently awarded a $238.7 million contract to operate NASA’s scientific balloon facilities and provide engineering support for the NASA Balloon Program.

Jeany Llorente ’00

Helios Prototype flying wing

At the close of World War II, American forces uncovered an underground production plant in Germany containing components for thousands of V-2 rockets. The cache–300 railroad cars of rocket parts–arrived at White Sands in August 1945. Along with the rockets came twenty captured German scientists, including the famous Dr. Wernher Von Braun, who were sent to help assemble and test the V-2s.

Gilbert Moore, working on a degree in chemical engineering at New Mexico State University, was not yet twenty when he began working for the Physical Science Laboratory (PSL) as a student “grunt” in 1947. PSL, only a year old itself, operated from the basement of Kent Hall where its main task was reducing telemetry data from the V-2 rocket tests at White Sands Proving Ground.

Moore recalls one early V-2 test that became a rocket science blooper. “The rocket took off as planned,” he says, “but it headed south to El Paso instead of north into the missile range and we had no way to stop it.” The rocket crashed into a Juarez cemetery without casualties. Undaunted, Mexican entrepreneurs charged admission to the site and sold bits of the V-2 as souvenirs. As a result, PSL scientists outfitted later rockets with TNT that could be detonated to abort errant flights.

V-2 Rocket

Today, PSL has expanded from this early data reduction role to that of scientific exploration, including a $2.1 million research project on the V-2’s distant cousin—the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV).

Global Hawk UAV

Bill Gutman, PSL’s chief scientist, says the UAV best fits situations that are “dull, dirty, or dangerous.” Dull, for example, is the job of the solarpowered Helios model, which can fly 24 hours a day and comes equipped with infrared cameras. It is being tested in Hawaii, where aerial photos help determine peak harvest times for coffee beans. Under the dirty category, a UAV could be used to collect samples of volcanic dust in the atmosphere.

Dangerous could mean using pilotless planes in forest fire surveillance.

Because these “flying robots” don’t have to account for the human factor, they can be as small as a man’s hand or as large as the wingspan of a 747. The lack of a pilot, however, has been a drawback in getting FAA approval for the UAV to share civilian airspace with other aircraft.

Kathy Hansen, director of business development at PSL, says the latest research funding is aimed at helping the FAA develop a “regulatory road map” to guide both the FAA and the UAV industry in determining standards that would allow UAVs into civilian airspace. To test those parameters, PSL has permission to fly UAVs out of the Las Cruces International Airport.

“This airspace includes desert, the mountains of the Black Range, farmlands, plus Caballo Reservoir,” says Gutman. “It is like having 300,000 square miles available for remote sensing research,” he says. PSL is working to persuade the FAA to expand this airspace. The demand for UAVs from scientists, from the commercial arena and from NASA is clearly there, and disciplines as diverse as atmospheric sciences, ecology and surveillance will benefit from the expanded use of these versatile airborne laboratories.

Linda G. Harris ’80

 

The New Mexico Space Grant Consortium administers some $5 million a year in federal and private funds for programs and scholarships. Pat Hynes, consortium director, says the space-grant concept harkens back to the late 1800s when Congress funded land grant colleges to help improve agricultural education and research. Under the space-grant, the goal is to encourage New Mexicans to learn more about the space sciences and to pursue careers in aerospace. The seventeen-member consortium, which is based at New Mexico State, includes museums, public schools and universities statewide.

Space-grant scholarships totaling $100,000 are awarded annually at three New Mexico universities and two New Mexico community colleges. Programs can range from one as ambitious as sponsoring college students to conduct gravity experiments at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, to one as simple as paying for a grade school field trip to the Very Large Array observatory near Socorro, N.M.

Hynes says participation in space-grant programs as well as applications for research and scholarships increase every year. “We hope to have as good a run as the land-grant program,” she says.

Linda G. Harris ’80

Under NASA's Reduced Gravity Student Flight Opportunities Program, New Mexico State engineering and science students conduct their own experiment in microgravity.