I was watching some "why not launch rockets from airplanes?" and thought "hey, why not balloons? How hard could it be?"
And it turns out the answer's "not very!" A Falcon 9 rocket, fully loaded, weighs in at about 550,000kg. Hydrogen balloons get you about 1kg of lift per cubic meter, so mathing that out means we'd just have to hook the rocket up to a spherical balloon about 101m in diameter. Easy!
Time to put together a business plan and go looking for some sweet, sweet (stupid) VC cash...
@wordshaper Launching a rocket in the vicinity of enough hydrogen to fill up a a 101m diameter balloon seems like it might be problematic. Isn't that more or less what happened to the Hindenberg?
Honestly this was a very tongue-in-cheek post. Hooking a giant space flamethrower up to a massive bag of flammable gas (or two, unless you want the space flamethrower zooming right through the gas bag) is the kind of Galaxy Brain idea that gets you funding from ketamine-addled VCs but strikes me as an excitingly bad idea in Real Life.
(lifting a rocket up out of at least some of the atmosphere isn't a theoretically bad idea, just a practically impractical one)
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