The Jetson Conspiracy

It’s not new – a balloon filled with hot air or with a gas that’s lighter than the Oxygen/Nitrogen mix of our atmosphere floating up into the sky. Maybe carrying a person or two.

The first balloonists even went so far as to say that they weren’t flying but riding – like riding a boot floating through the atmosphere. Only, a boot is on mostly flat water, while a balloon "flies" up and down. Something like a submarine. (So, what does a submarine do? Drive?)

Anyway, nowadays blimps are filled with exotic gases, usually helium, to become lighter than "air". Even lighter is hydrogen, but that has other problems, such as being burnable and weakening the materials containing it.

Now, there aren’t many gases that are light enough to even be a candidate. For one of the biggest problems of using flotation is that the earth’s atmosphere is thin anyway, being composed mostly of two relatively light gasses: O2 and N2.

As a floatant, one could use Methane (55% weight of air), Helium (14%), Ammonia (60% of air), Hydrogen (7%), for instance. Here you can see why Helium is used most often, even though it is somewhat rare here on earth and therefore comparatively expensive to produce.

And, of course there is one other possible gas, although we don’t consider it a gas in the usual world: WATER. Well, steam. Steam has to be heated to above 100°C to be stable (not condense) – now, try keeping your balloon floating with that – it will soon become a waterbomb if not enough energy is used to keep the water gaseous. On the positive side, steam has a boyancy of about 60% of helium’s, being about 65% as "heavy" as cool air. Not bad, is it?

The idea in and of itself is not new [there’s nothing new under the sun], as this website about a water (steam) blimp/balloon would show. There it’s obvious that, like most everything else in our technical world, we have to find the "trick" to it, before we can use it.

There are two "tricks" that I’ve come up with..

..that could REVOLUTIONIZE our relationship with the atmosphere..

The first is to mix the non-helium gases (hydrogen, methane, ammonia, steam) so that the negative properties of each can be cancelled out (hydrogen won’t leak out, ammonia isn’t too aggressive, methane won’t burn too easy). That way, the point of evaporation for water can at least be dropped enough that not too much energy is wasted keeping the gas warm.

In short, use water as an additive to the other gases.

The other trick requires a complete reframing of the question. For when we think about putting steam in a balloon, we usually think of the sportsman type of thing in a hot air balloon (which, btw has about half the nominal lift at 110°C as steam). When I think of vapor water used for bouancy, however, I’m not really concerned about what’s needed at ground level.

To make water work as a bouyant, we need to go to an altitude of around 30,000 meters – at about the same height as the ozone layer.

Why there??
1. The pressure up there is low enough so that water boils at about freezing point at sea level.
2. The temperature up there is high enough that water would boil spontaneously.
3. There is (for all practical purposes) no wind, meaning that the boyous structures would not need to be that robust in construction.

Didn’t you ever wonder as a kid how they kept the Jetsons' buildings up in the sky??

Well, back then they wanted to keep it a secret because they thought people would want to live up in the sky and fight to get there. But nowadays, futuristic ideas outside of the net and i-phones are not that popular – neither on the cornucopian side nor the resource restrained side.

Now, if nobody’s listening, why am I silly enough to write all this?!