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...
