My Beautiful Balloon


My Beautiful Balloon

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5akEgsZSfhg

Originally shared by Irina T.

The Odyssey of Project Echo

"The Echo balloon was perhaps the most beautiful object ever to be put into space. The big and brilliant sphere had a 31,416-square foot surface of Mylar plastic covered smoothly with a mere 4 pounds of vapor-deposited aluminum. All told, counting 30 pounds of inflating chemicals and two 11-ounce, 3/8-inch-thick radio tracking beacons (packed with 70 solar cells and 5 storage batteries), the sphere weighed only 132 pounds.

For those enamored with its aesthetics, folding the beautiful balloon into its small container for packing into the nose cone of a Thor-Delta rocket was somewhat like folding a large Rembrandt canvas into a tiny square and taking it home from an art sale in one's wallet. However, the folding of the balloon posed more than aesthetic problems. The structure not only had to fit inside the spherical canister but also had to unfold properly for inflation.

The technique for folding the 100 foot inflatable balloons evolved from a classic "Eureka" moment. One morning in 1960, Ed Kilgore, the man in the Engineering Service Division responsible for the Shotput test setups, received a call from Schjeldahl, the manufacturer of the Echo balloons. The company's technicians were having a terrible time: not only were they unable to fit the balloon into its canister, they couldn't even squeeze it into a small room.

Kilgore mulled over the problem all day and part of the night, but it wasn't until the next morning that he happened upon a possible solution. "It was raining," he recalls, "and as I started to leave for work, my wife Ann arrived at the door to go out as I did. She had her plastic rain hat m her hand. It was folded in a long narrow strip and unfolded to a perfect hemisphere to fit the head." Recognizing the importance of his accidental discovery, Kilgore told his wife that she "would have to use an umbrella or get wet because I needed that rain hat."

Excerpted from/ Read in full
The Odyssey of Project Echo/ NASA history
https://history.nasa.gov/SP-4308/ch6.htm

Image:
https://images.nasa.gov/#/details-LRC-1958-B701_P-03600.html
Location: Weeksville, N.C.
Photographer: NACA
Date Created: 1958-08-13
"Inflation Tests of the Echo 1 Satellite in Weeksville, N.C. 1958-L-03603 Image Langley engineers Edwin Kilgore (center), Norman Crabill (right) and an unidentified man take a peek inside the vast balloon during inflation tests. Page. 183 Space Flight Revolution NASA Langley Research Center From Sputnik to Apollo. NASA SP-4308."

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