Hacker News Reader

This looks awesome. Going up shouldn’t be too bad; but the decent is the part that scares me. Wouldn’t it reenter orbit with extreme velocity?

Orbit? It’s a balloon gondola.

It will have about zero horizontal velocity, or whatever ambient wind speed. For orbit, it would need 21000 kph.

Average windspeed at 30km altitude looks to be about 15 m/s which is certainly not nothing especially compared to average surface speeds.