> balloons capable of traversing large distances safely and reliably.
How would you do that? Once it is in the air isn't it at the mercy of the air currents (can you control the altitude?). Then is it a matter of analyzing and predicting the flow of air currents and the weather?
Japanese for example attempted to send balloons over the pacific that were intended to drop on US and start forest fires.
Prediction tools are a big part of it. The US government publishes global wind data every 6 hours, as well as tools that can be used to parse and process this data. We've done a bunch of scripting on top of that to automatically email, sms, and tweet launch opportunities. The team doing the predictions is too busy/lazy to upload their code to our github account(https://github.com/whitestarballoon/), and that's the only reason it isn't open source.
We can drop ballast to maintain altitude, but we don't have any other control. As a result, we must wait for the winds.
The Japanese balloons were examples of exquisite analog engineering. The Army made a great video documenting their construction and operation (available here: http://www.archive.org/details/gov.archives.arc.13084).
How would you do that? Once it is in the air isn't it at the mercy of the air currents (can you control the altitude?). Then is it a matter of analyzing and predicting the flow of air currents and the weather?
Japanese for example attempted to send balloons over the pacific that were intended to drop on US and start forest fires.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_balloon
They even claimed one human victim.