A science blog with Eric Berger

NASA balloon carrying telescope crashes in Australia


A 400-foot NASA balloon crashed in the Australian outback today, according to reports, destroying the Nuclear Compton Telescope it was launching into space.

The unmanned balloon, built at NASA’s Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility in Palestine, Texas, was to have carried the telescope to an altitude of about 120,000 feet.

One of the telescope’s research scientists, Berkeley graduate student Eric Bellm, writes heartbreakingly about the crash on his blog, Dispatches from the Field:

Today was a terrible day for a lot of people. For the NCT team, we’ve poured our hearts into this instrument for years. It was an almost unfathomable shock to find ourselves cleaning up the wreckage of our gondola rather than watching it lift off towards space. I’m very grateful for the outpouring of support from friends and colleagues around the world-it really does help.

Given the media attention this incident has brought, I’m inclined not to discuss the crash in too much detail. Obviously there will be a full investigation into what went wrong today, so it doesn’t seem helpful to add premature speculation. I have a tremendous amount of respect for the CSBF personnel, and I’d like to avoid complicating the process for them. In short, NCT came off the launch vehicle badly and hit the ground several times as the abort completed.

Here’s one of several photos Bellm has at his blog:
Eric Bellm

At the scene of the wreck.

At this time it’s worth remembering that getting things, including people, into space is hard. My best to the scientists in getting this project going again.

Categories: Space
Eric Berger

21 Responses

  1. JohnD says:

    It is a shame that this happened. The NASA scientific balloon program is one of the most efficient and safest programs that they have. For a fraction of the cost of a rocket launch, they put instruments up for days or months at a time and get some amazing data. Previous launches in this series have a success rate of 92% and have refined out images of the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation and positron emissions from galaxies.

    As is common with launches from Adelaide, Australia, this one was going to get us some information on gamma rays using three instruments: HERO, NCT, and TIGRE.

  2. aaron says:

    Whats Sheldon’s quote from Big Bang Theory? “Gravity you cold hearted bitch” …or something like that.

    I hate to see this kind of thing. Especially when the approach was innovative and ingenious. The bad part is the loss of the craft. The worse part is the dissapointment that must come from something like this.

  3. spit & kick dirt says:

    Does Lloyd’s insure these kinds of expeditions? Don’t laugh, they started out underwriting ships on the high seas which were the technological equivalent of their time.

  4. Jim says:

    Well, that sure cancelled out a few “Atta boys”

  5. ttyler5 says:

    Eric, Heads Up —

    This is terrible, but look, here is raw video of the crash at YouTube, it happened on take off:

  6. Jeff says:

    So how much did this cost us?

  7. Hal says:

    The incompetent idiots tried to launch it in a high wind. With the instrument package tethered to the ground, or slightly above it, the balloon itself is try to fly away. This will cause the top of the balloon to get closer to the ground than it normally would be if it was rising straight up. Once the instrument package came lose it had no place to go except right into the ground and then the balloon just drug it along the ground. Somebody needs to get fired over this fiasco. If this is the best NASA has to offer they can forget ever getting close to Mars with a human being, alive anyway.

  8. miggy says:

    I’d like to see a list of how much money has been blown in the last 20 years on NASA’s failed rocket launches, Mars rovers that get stuck and balloons that crash, etc. I bet it’s in the tens of billions. Shame.

    Citizens could have that money in their pockets to stimulate the economy, no?

  9. Ken says:

    It looked like the payload was too heavy for the balloon. Maybe it was a mixup of English and Metric measurements again, like in Hubble.

  10. JohnD says:

    So how much did this cost us?

    Funding for the program (personnel, balloons, payloads, analysis, etc.) is about $15,000,000 per year. Given that this is one of five flights this year, this mission’s cost is on the order of $3,000,000.

    Compared to the cost of launching a satellite or putting a payload on the ISS, these things are dirt cheap. But that’s no consolation to the scientists who worked for the better part of a decade to put their instruments together for the payload, nor to the graduate students who had hoped to use the data for their dissertations.

  11. JohnD says:


    To borrow from a NASA administrator, no money is wasted in space; it all gets spent right here on Earth. The money from the various failed missions did get put to good use. Not only did it employ engineers and scientists, it also helped us learn important lessons.

    Yes, there have been a couple of stupid bloopers. One of the Mariner probes missed Mercury because a minus sign had been left out of its programming. The Mars Climate Orbiter was doomed because a contractor used English units instead of metric. And so on. But, by and large, NASA’s record for getting probes to their destinations in unrivaled and has taught us much about how to get from here to there.

  12. Capn McBarnacle says:

    Sorry Miggy,

    I’d rather spend my money on failed balloon launches than bailing your irresponsible A** out from your mortgage.

  13. BobM says:

    Miggy wrote: ‘d like to see a list of how much money has been blown in the last 20 years on NASA’s failed…Mars rovers that get stuck..

    The Mars Rovers were programmed to last 3 months. They’ve been up there over 5 years. Spirit didn’t get stuck until its fifth year. I hardly consider that a failure.

  14. craig says:

    I seem to be missing something here. OK 120,000 feet is pretty high alright amd maybe by some defintion kind of “space” but what was the goal? Surely a balloon could not get anything into orbit. What were their goals with this “launch”/

  15. casewase says:


    Huge NASA Science Balloon Crashes in Australian Outback

  16. major says:

    Who launches a balloon in high winds? C’mon MIT!

  17. ttyler5 says:

    “High winds”?

    Here’s the YouTube video of the crash.

    Does anyone see any evidence of high winds in this video?

    I certainly don’t

    — the dust from the crash doesn’t blow away and the parachute floats windlessly to the ground.

  18. JohnD says:


    With most scientific ballooning, the point is to get the payload above the majority of the atmosphere for better “seeing”. In the case of gamma ray observing, the atmosphere shields us from the vast majority of incoming particles. Thus, in order to get a clean view of gamma ray sources in the universe, we must go above the atmosphere. (Think of it as the difference between looking at something through dirty sunglasses and looking at it with the naked eye.)

    That is the reason that many observatories are built on mountaintops, which helps with visible light. However, gamma rays are even more sensitive to the atmosphere and create Cherenkov radiation and secondary cosmic rays. Because both of these may also be created by other processes, getting above the atmosphere is essential to getting a good view.

  19. The Other Tex says:


    I think you missed the fact that the balloon dragged the payload sideways fast enough to tip a parked car over. If the balloon is going sideways faster than it is going vertically and has enough force in its sideways motion to tip over a parked car, it is safe to say there must have been some decent winds blowing at launch time, even if they were not at ground surface. The surface winds may have been light, but there was apparently enough wind at the height of the balloon to pull it sideways against the launch tether holding the payload down.

  20. ttyler5 says:


    The video indicates that there was just enough gas in the bag to simply drag the payload

    — which indicates it had not yet reached its initial inflation for launch

    — IOW, it released far too early.

    This would point to such possible causes as a hardware failure on the launch rig, a failure in the payload release mechanism, and so on.