Some late detail (Score 1)

Hello all. My name is Mark Weislogel, the now old guy who did the water balloon stuff on the NASA low-g aircraft. Sorry to be clueing in to this conversation so late, but I received too many emails over the weekend to be able to respond one by one, and I just want to tell the story a little more completely. We were performing unrelated experiments on the NASA airplane related to liquid fuel tanks on spacecraft. But we could only utilize 15 of the 50 trajectories that the plane made due to our experimental equipment. So instead of twiddling our thumbs for the remaining 35 trajectories we proposed/conducted these water balloon experiments inside a plastic room made cheaply for the NASA DC-9 aircraft at Glenn Research Center--mostly because they were cool, but also because they demonstrate so clearly how large liquid blobs can be rapidly and easily deployed. (Most people expect the liquid to go everywhere instead of basically remain in tact as a blob, and at the time NASA was looking in to deploying large liquid drops in low-g by any number of techniques.) Make the blobs large enough and you can study totally unearthly self-gravitating capillary blobs--models of fluid planets, suns, or I don't know? By self-gravitating and capillary I mean the self-gravitation force is on the order of the surface tension force--a truly weird situation, but one certainly to be experienced by the spacecraft of the future that may have to employ literally tons and tons of self-gravitating fuel to get anywhere. But the primary purpose was fun. The videos have since become an excellent outreach tool with 100,000+ hits, music videos, and copies made and distributed to k-12 teachers. The cost was nearly nothing to the government and I bought the balloons myself. I did borrow a high-speed camera to do those few ground tests, but I did the tests at lunch time while being shadowed by two home-schoolers on a career day thing. I returned the camera. So just to say, it was low budget. The footage was voted by the American Physical Society as one of the decade's top submissions for the Gallery of Fluid Motion publication. Believe me? Anyway, we did about 80 ruptures, most were flops: hit them with ping-pong paddles, glitter, Alka-Seltzer tablets, static electric fields, etc. You would have loved it. You probably would have some cool ideas yourself. I will talk to NASA about putting the highrez movies up. I have forgotten all about that. Also, there's going to be a reunion tour if all goes well, so stay tuned--more blobs to follow, blobs with a twist. later...