Ep. 78: From Fashion to Flight, Pamela Bergmann's Journey in Balloon Engineering
Pamela Bergmann takes us deep into the intricacies of balloon technology, from the emerging field of pico balloons to the substantial full-size NASA payload balloons, which can weigh up to 8,000 pounds.
Pamela, a former senior program manager for the Google Loon project, shares her journey from fashion design to balloon engineering, highlighting the unique challenges and innovations within the balloon manufacturing sector.
The conversation explores the operational efficiencies and potential of small-scale balloons in atmospheric data collection, juxtaposed with the more traditional, larger NASA balloons used for significant scientific missions.
We examine the evolution of materials and design, and discuss how advancements in technology are reshaping the future of ballooning. Ultimately, this episode provides a profound insight into the fusion of engineering and creativity in the realm of aerial exploration.
Takeaways:
- In this episode, Pamela Bergmann shares her unique journey from fashion design to balloon engineering, highlighting the unexpected paths one can take in their career.
- The discussion delves into the intricacies of balloon manufacturing, touching upon the challenges of materials selection and the evolution from traditional sewing to modern welding techniques.
- We explore the fascinating world of pico balloons, noting their potential for atmospheric research and the increasing accessibility for amateur balloon enthusiasts.
- Pamela emphasizes the importance of understanding buoyancy and pressure dynamics in balloon design, which directly influences operational success and data reliability.
- The conversation reveals insights into NASA's large payload balloons, particularly their capacity to carry significant weights, showcasing the advancements in balloon technology over the years.
- Finally, the episode underscores the collaborative efforts within the ballooning community, as professionals share knowledge and experiences to push the boundaries of what's possible in this field.
Links referenced in this episode:
Companies mentioned in this episode:
- Loon
- Aerostar
- Scientific Balloon Systems
Transcript
Pamela, thanks so much for coming on the show.
Speaker B:Yeah, thanks, Nik.
Speaker A:I'm excited to have you on. It's been a while since I've done one of these. Last time was with a designer buddy of mine, and it's cool to have another designer.
Speaker B:What kind of designer?
Speaker A:Outdoor gear. This guy Dave Schipper. He's built backpacks and trousers and pants and shirts and everything you can think of for outdoor textiles. Yeah.
Speaker B:Cool.
Speaker A:And he's been going over to the Pacific Rim forever, and so he's, like, super familiar with their factories and how the whole thing works. Works like the soup to nuts.
Speaker B:Yeah. It's complex.
Speaker A:But let's talk about you. You say you're a balloon nerd, but you started off as not a balloon nerd.
Speaker B: , I want to do it. Anyway, so:I was a fresh graduate working retail, and then I just, like, got on those career websites and wound up at loon. But I didn't know it was loon.
Speaker A:Tell me about that. I think it was. It was, like, a secret thing you were getting hired for. What? How did that work?
Speaker B:I had no idea. Like, the advertisement just said repetitive processes. People who know how to sew, sail making, that kind of stuff. And.
And then I just called and, like, sat down at a picnic table across from, like, Mike Cassidy, who. I had no idea who he was when I talked to him.
And, you know, he asked me about what I did this morning and what I had for breakfast, that kind of question. And there it was.
Speaker A:So it was more of, like, a vibe check than a.
Speaker B:It was like a weird vibe check. Yeah, like, oh, you sew. Oh, you. You know, and I had, like, stitched Google colors down my resume cover with my sewing machine as, like, a little.
Speaker A:This is in the days of paper resumes.
Speaker B:I handed over a paper resume.
Speaker A:Well done.
Speaker B: This is: Speaker A:Okay.
Speaker B:Yeah, Like, Skunk Works. Time X was still quiet. No one knew it wasn't X yet. The moonshot factory.
And, yeah, it was like, Wild Ride Fashion dropped in with, like, a group of people manufacturing balloons by hand. And then, you know, oh, we have this balloon manufacturer. Why? Can you check out their stuff and see what you know about it?
We had, like, designated reading hours set up in the beginning, too. They just wanted us to get a bunch of research, and it was really kind of a special time.
Speaker A: llooning thing in December of: Speaker B:Okay.
Speaker A:And I was like, ah, this. This thing looks super cool.
My buddy Matthew Patrick had kind of nerd sniped me and into it, and there was some of the first stuff that I thought was like, all right, what do the processes look like to make these? And who are the balloon manufacturers?
Speaker B:And Picos are really hot right now.
Speaker A:It's. Yeah, it's. Picos are.
I think it's kind of the time where folks have this understanding like, oh, shit, we could send up whatever 30,000 of these things and have this really granular understanding the atmosphere that we may never have had before.
Speaker B:It's like that drone model. Right. Like, go to many. We have cluster logic now and planning software that's very complex, like AI.
Speaker A:Yeah, yeah. There's. There's lots of magic in the air.
Speaker B:Yeah. So coordination becomes less of the thing and.
And so that you take the hardware engineering problems that are very hard and soft goods is even harder. I'll tell you that. Plastics is even harder in some ways. That's what every hardware engineer has ever told me.
Speaker A:Huh? Yeah. I mean, I'm finding it difficult, but I'm new, so everything's difficult.
Speaker B:Yeah, it's. Textiles was like my thing, so it went from like wovens to plastics, but they kind of act like knits and.
Speaker A:You know, and knits are stretchy. Okay.
Speaker B:Stretchy and unpredictable sometimes, like, they require a lot of control to get the shape you think you want.
Speaker A:Maybe we start there and we talk about shapes for balloons, because everything I've seen that just looks like this upside down teardrop. But I'm also thinking that, man, maybe all the geometry hasn't been explored.
Speaker B:Like, what do you really early balloons was round, a sphere, mathematically easily easy for them to calculate stress and all kinds of stuff. And the materials were not super strong. We had, like, mostly just the hard.
I mean, it started out with like, just intestines, the very first balloons. And then moving into when we could manufacture plastics. That's when shapes got more interesting, I think was after the plastics revolution.
So from circles to pillows to like pumpkins, things that had lenticular gores or diamond shaped gores.
Speaker A:And the gore for folks listening is just like the individual section of the balloon. Yes, If I'm getting it right.
Speaker B:Yep. Yeah. It's like a slice of the orange.
Speaker A:Okay. And it's a slice of the orange, but the orange is A more or less perfect sphere. And if you have these gores going in, there's these little ridges.
Speaker B:Pumpkin.
Speaker A:A pumpkin?
Speaker B:Yeah, yeah, yeah. We usually call it a pumpkin shape.
Speaker A:All right. And do you think there are better things out there that haven't been discovered?
I mean, you're there nine years and it's Google, so I can't imagine they missed stuff.
Speaker B:I mean people are playing with everything. They're playing with positive pressure, negative pressure, vacuum vessels. The people are doing like all kinds of shapes.
But I think the trend that I see is simplifying. So where we had the, like NASA mega balloons that carry tons and tons to near space and then like shoot a rocket off the bottom, Right. That's crazy.
Speaker A:It's like an 8,000 pound payload banana.
Speaker B:They can do that. But I think I'm seeing more like these small little sondes. Right. Like things that are just floating around collecting data.
And a big reason I know for that is regulation right now, like you can still launch lots of little things often in flight pathways and things like that if you're just sensitive about the hours.
Speaker A:Yeah, I feel like, I mean, this is not something I'll do, but I live in suburban San Diego, right under one of the flight paths.
It seems like I could probably just lift, you know, let one of these go off the house at night, after 10 o' clock when stuff starts flying or stops flying in. And like.
Speaker B:Yeah, if you can follow air traffic, it's just staying out of their window. They always have a quiet hour. So you're launching at like 4 in the morning. Yep. It's actually better for balloons to launch early.
Speaker A:Why is that?
Speaker B:You want to like hit your pressurization. Not when your sun is heating you up. Because it's like twofold, adding stress to target. Yeah.
So you kind of like it relaxes the balloon in early morning and then it can go. That's one philosophy.
Speaker A:And how much do you think actually we should spend some time or a little bit of time explaining that? Because I'm making sure I understand it.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker A:So my current understanding is you inflate the balloon. And when I first came into these, like, oh, you blow the balloon up and so it's nice and tight. Then you let it go. But that's not true at all.
You blow it up. So that I think the best word to describe it, but perhaps not totally appropriate is flaccid.
And so the thing is just like this, I don't know, basically loopy, goopy.
Speaker B:Crazy looking thing, inflatable waving balloon man. But the top of it has a balloon pulling up because, like, the bubble stays. We call it the bubble.
When it's loose inside there, the bubble is like the bubble of gas. It kind of holds together, unless it's been like, separated by turbulence or something, to a second bubble, which is bad. Okay. But the. Yeah.
If the bubble's, like, going, you usually put about a 20th ish of the volume for typical flow altitudes, but that changes. That's a choice. That's like a design decision.
Speaker A:Right. And then as this thing goes up for folks just imagining this as they drive in their car, there's this bubble that's cool and it's in the balloon.
So the balloon is just this kind of crazy.
Speaker B:It's like a windsock with a tennis ball in the front, but it's like shooting upward like a cork.
Speaker A:Yep. And then it expands as it goes up, because that's how physics works.
Speaker B:Yep. It gets less dense, just like when your ears pop and going up to Tahoe or whatever.
Speaker A:Yep, yep.
Speaker B:And then it expands.
Speaker A:It gets up to some point where the balloon is as expanded as it will get. And in some cases, like weather balloons, they just burst because the tension or the fabric can't hold the tension.
And in other cases, they're designed to not burst and just stay up there at a specific altitude until something breaks or they drop ballast or something magical happens.
Speaker B:It's called super pressure.
Speaker A:Super pressure. Okay.
Speaker B:It is the equilibrium, like, of the pressure of the balloon in its float altitude based on its buoyancy.
Speaker A:Okay. That makes enough sense to me. So it gets up to a point where the pressure inside the balloon and outside the balloon is the same.
Is that I'm getting that.
Speaker B:It'S actually the vessel stopping the pressure from expanding any further. And there's no driving force because you've reached neutral altitude buoyancy for that internal pressure.
Speaker A:Okay, guys. Also super cool.
Speaker B:Cool, huh?
Speaker A:The payloads that you. I mean, what Loon was doing was trying to bring wireless Internet to places it didn't have it, if I remember right.
Speaker B:Yes. Connect the unconnected, which at the time we started was like a third of the world and then shrank a lot over the 10 years. Right.
And so, like, I always remind companies, like, there's a timing component that is outside your control.
But the learnings is like, that's why in balloons, having the opportunity to, like, get so deep and then share it with lots of people is a fun part of my work.
Speaker A:Yeah. It's a super cool piece. Okay. And most of this, the work that You've done has been with. I would consider them larger than pico balloons. Is that right?
Speaker B:I would say is mix.
Speaker A:Mix. Okay. Is there like a size component or way that you refer to them? Because I've only ever looked at these pico.
But I don't know if you guys call them like. Oh yeah, there's meso balloons and mega.
Speaker B:Balloons and no, it's usually talked about in like the volume like cubic meters of gas.
Speaker A:Okay.
Speaker B:Yeah, usually we say like or like they'll make up cute marketing terms. We used to say, Lynn, balloons were the size of a tennis court across a tennis court.
Speaker A:That seems pretty big.
Speaker B:Yeah. So like end to end on a tennis court is the width of the pumpkin. If you look at it on the side.
Speaker A:Dang. So the payload on that has got to be a couple. More than a couple kilos, right?
Speaker B:Don't quote me, but yeah, hundreds of kilos.
Speaker A:Okay. So these are really. I would consider them like really big balloons. Like, you can't just hold this down. Being 150 pound, dude, it can carry you away.
You're going for a ride.
Speaker B:Yeah, for sure. We had a boat crane to launch these things. You know those three sided cranes that lower boats down into the.
That instead of a boat, it carried this like almost platform that had all the automation that launched a balloon.
Speaker A:Gotcha.
Speaker B:Forget what the stat was that we got down to, but we could do it pretty fast.
Speaker A:You could launch a balloon pretty quickly. And there's a ton of logistics that must go into that because the fabric or the. The envelope material has to be probably pretty delicate.
So you can't just be winging that thing around the back of a pickup truck.
Speaker B:Yeah, I had three sides of shades that go down on the boat crane. That's why. Boat crane. Because you basically have like a moving shelter.
Speaker A:Huh.
Speaker B:From ground winds.
Speaker A:Yep. Okay, so that makes sense. So you're building this moving shelter.
You inflate the balloon inside of it, and then at some point do you just like mash on the gas and you're like, okay, it's gonna escape. Basically the shelter. We have to put a ton in it. Or is it the. The shelter is so big that it never.
Speaker B:The procedure was to raise the platform to the top of the shelter. The balloon is truncated to like half height ish with just like a, you know, strain relief.
Like a turn back on the platform and then it would stand up and the claw would let go and like all that. So it was a automated process.
Speaker A:Okay. It's not. I mean, that's probably one of the super fun parts about these pico balloons for me is I'm pretty sure I can do the entire thing myself.
Speaker B:You can just hand it into the air.
Speaker A:Yeah, yeah. Which is very.
Speaker B:Yeah, no. And that's, like, what I'm really excited about right now.
With that progress, it really drives the problems less into, like, complicated upstream manufacturing. Quality assurance, which is still important, but, like, less of that and more. And like, okay.
Just fundamentals of quality, repeatable manufacturing that you can do in your garage.
Speaker A:Yeah, let's maybe hit that.
So for you, this is all probably native, is that there's this idea like, oh, there are balloon envelope manufacturers and there's film manufacturers and there's massive ones. All right, can you. Are they top secret? Can you talk? I've been going to these, like, medical ceiling conferences.
Like, hey, do you guys have any films for balloons?
Speaker B:And they're like, I would say, big dogs in the United States. United States. It's Aerostar.
Speaker A:Aerostar.
Speaker B:They have the NASA contract intermingling. They're solid. Like, they're really good. Okay. They built the loon balloons. And they're excellent, excellent manufacturers.
Speaker A:So you've got this deep expertise. And are they doing small stuff or big stuff? Do you know if they're doing, like, pico balloon sized? A couple.
Speaker B:That's their business.
Speaker A:Is it?
Speaker B:Okay, Yeah, I don't know what all their business is.
Speaker A:I know on the pico balloon forums, there's a company called Scientific Balloon Systems that people will buy from. And Those are like 25 to 75 bucks a balloon. Like, super general.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker A:And then there's the Chinese party balloons, which is what most people seem to use. And I think I got 20 of those for 60 bucks or something. And so it's hard to argue with, like, all right, here's all these balloons.
I ran a bunch of stats on them and came up with about 30% of all Pico balloon flights fail within the first week, which is not great. But also, if you have 20 balloons for 60 bucks, that's way better than two balloons for.
Speaker B:Yeah. I think, like, I see philosophically in engineering that people with complex systems have this, like, rigor built in because they have to.
And I think when we always, like, the, like, bleeding edge of new trends, like pico balloons going smaller, going faster. Can I manufacture this as a product for revenue instead of as part of a vehicle for another product that's kind of newer at that price point?
And so, like, then you trim out a lot of the complicated stuff, and then you get the Reliability stuff. So it just depends. I think it's like you're not looking at it all day, every day because it's not the core part of your model.
Speaker A:Right.
It's always funny to come into these things because I have this massive repeating mistake that I make that just because I don't know it, no one else knows it. And then I get into something like, oh, no, there's plenty of people that know all about this stuff.
Speaker B:So that's why I was excited to follow your cold chamber, build your vacuum chamber, liquid nitrogen cold chamber. Because it's a really kudos good start to get your test environment set up first.
Speaker A:It seems super important.
And that was the very first thing I saw when I got into this thing and started reading about it was like, guys are saying, hey, I can do vacuum and I can do cold, but I can't do cold and vacuum.
And then there's another aspect of UV degradation which is significantly more expensive because if I'm getting it right, an accelerated weathering test with UV takes something like 80 days and it's going to cost about a thousand bucks just in electricity in San Diego.
Speaker B:My recommendation is get to UV DEG problems. When you get to UV DAG problems. That's what I always tell people.
Because unless you have some rapid crippling crystallinity problem where like the minute UV touches you, your material properties change. And unless that's your problem, it's not your problem yet. I promise. You have, like, so many more things to solve.
Speaker A:Huh. Okay, could you walk me through what those, what those might be?
Speaker B:Yeah, like, early balloon problems are missing geometry. Right. So, like, stuff's a little crooked. My heat seals are not consistent. My, like, bar moves. My. I don't know how to make a good heat seal. Right.
Like, what is a good heat seal? Can I test my heat seals? Can I hold the pressure? I think at that temperature, what's my stress? Do I, like, what float altitude should I choose?
And like, what rate should I ascend this balloon to not overcome its stresses that I may or may not know. And, and I think then you figure out, like, oh, I have some stress risers or I'm doing some things wrong. I'm.
You get some failed stuff back hopefully, and it gives you some clues. But it's. You're going to solve a lot more burst problems and leak problems way before uvdig.
Speaker A:Oh, interesting. And are a lot of these companies making their own or do they just go to Aerostar or. Or maybe there's a couple other.
And they're like, yeah, just make me a balloon.
Speaker B:I think it's probably a mix, but it's definitely based on budget. Aerostar does things top notch and you pay for it. Right. So that's just, you know, and they have a large operation.
They've been doing it for, like, decades. There's decades of legacy all the way back to, like, Otto Winzon and, like, these guys in the early balloon, like, world war timeframe.
So they're, They're. They have the legacy, for sure.
Speaker A:Yeah. I mean, it's fascinating to watch and also interesting for me to think, like, all right, what does a new industry opportunity look like?
And is there a place for a small company to crank out a ton of smaller balloons that may not be NASA spec, but are good enough to.
Speaker B:There's tons of space. Because it just becomes like, what is your operation? What's your con ops in the flight? What are you trying to do? Where.
What altitudes do you need to be at? Do you need to navigate those altitudes? And what part of the globe are you on? What time of year are you flying? Like, those kinds of things.
Speaker A:Yeah. Let's maybe talk about this navigation business, because I would think that balloons just go wherever the wind pushes them. But there's this.
Speaker B:They do.
Speaker A:There's this ability to go up and down by either releasing ballast or maybe.
Speaker B:Releasing gas, changing your density.
Speaker A:Okay.
Speaker B:Or mechanically driving yourself somewhere. Right. So, like, you see those airships, they have a propeller on them, like a zeppelin. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So that is, like, active.
Speaker A:Okay.
Speaker B:You can actively compress your gas by, like, compressing a gas in a chamber. Maybe it's inside your bigger balloon. Maybe it's outside as an extraneous, like, load bag, basically, that you're just compressing.
Sometimes it's more than one vessel, but it just changes your overall system density by compressing sometimes air, sometimes something else.
Speaker A:Oh, Andre. And these are. Must be much bigger systems, because everything I'm looking at, it's like. It's a little pcb.
Speaker B:Yeah.
But small balloons don't need as much to go up and down, so they're often flying below, like, the FAA limit for system mass, which doesn't allow them to do those kinds of things, like an impeller pump, anything like that. So it's just simple. It's, you know, it's a fan or they're pumping something. Not really. They're using ballast.
The old school way is you carry weight at the beginning that you will drop over the lifetime of the system to compensate for your loss. And free Lift.
Speaker A:It's interesting. I wonder if.
If the pico balloon folks are doing that, I haven't found it that they're doing it where they're just like, putting a couple extra pennies on the thing and dropping a penny every four days.
Speaker B:A penny's not a good idea. Usually they kill somebody. Usually it's a dissolvable pellet. They make ballast pellets or like sand or like these.
They make calibrated pellets so that you know what you're dropping. That's really the key to having a calibrated pellet like you are. You have small systems, so it also limits the number of sensors you can fly.
Loon had the luxury of, like, we could slap a sensor in a lot of places, and then you were just fighting for data space on board, but.
Speaker A:And data space meaning onboard memory or the ability to transmit it.
Speaker B:Both.
Speaker A:Both. Okay. Yeah. Huh. Yeah. It's such a different world. And I guess I should ask. You did loon for nine years, 10 years, something like that?
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker A:And then that ended and you're like, oh, I'm going to go do something else. And now you're helping companies with balloon consulting.
Speaker B:Yeah, I program managed in another space for a couple of years and I was like, I don't know if I just want to be a program manager forever and sell my soul too. And I just had a couple of, like, tech startups post Covid failures. Right. Where like, they were just not viable companies.
Speaker A:Lots of stuff doesn't work.
Speaker B:No. So I always say, like, my life was sort of based on being, like, pushed a little bit each time. Right.
So like pushed out of fashion school into balloons and then pushed into things.
But, like, this was a phone call from a NoW client asking if I could do some consulting, and they just knew about me from loon days and were like, reaching out. So.
Speaker A:And what does that look like? Or maybe the. The better question is. Cause I imagine that someone is going to look for a balloon consultant.
There are not that many podcasts that I can find on ballooning in general and probably even less on balloon consulting. So they'll probably find you. What would you tell them? Like, hey, this is what I can help you with.
This is what I can't help you with, and this is how to do it.
Speaker B:Yeah. So, like, I'm a materials person and I'm a program manager, so I'm going to look micro macro all the time.
So I think if you have problems with leaks and bursts or unknown failures, balloon forensics is my absolute Favorite thing in the whole world is, like, looking at evidence. Dead balloons. Give me a dead balloon. Yeah. But I will be able to tell you what happened if I can ask you enough questions.
And then in the lack of information, I love testing. So, like, I will help you simulate what you need to simulate to investigate that issue. But I like a trail ascent.
People call me when there's a problem.
Speaker A:That's good. That's always fun to get those calls and like, oh, everybody. Not everybody, but I certainly like figuring out problems.
And it sounds like you do as well.
Speaker B:It's the puzzle, you know, to fix.
Speaker A:Interesting. And then you've got some big ideas on balloons. We talked about it, and I said, what's the craziest thing you can think of?
I don't know if that's super undercover or not.
Speaker B:No, it's not. I actually. I'll tell the whole world. I think that balloons can replace cargo ships. And I know that right now, the business model does not solve.
I get it. I get it.
I'm more looking at, like, the meta shifts in the zeitgeist of supply chain and in the zeitgeist of consumerism and in sort of how we think about our stuff, like, moving our stuff.
I think with a few different, you know, with this, like, transition from, like, large balloons to pico balloons and, like, many drones to do a job, I kind of feel like we might use that same model. Right. And like, break things up and make them more flexible.
Speaker A:So these won't be like giant balloons that you're thinking. They'll just be a.
Speaker B:Not on the order of a shipping container. Like, how uncreative to say that just because it can't haul a shipping container's worth by itself.
Or like, you know, you're just directly trying to compare so much. Infrastructure has to change for that to be the case, too. Like airspace infrastructure. Pico guys, enjoy your time right now, your unregulated time.
But, like, as soon as this space gets saturated, you know what's happening next. Like, we've watched it. I remember watching it with loon. Like, the more they know about you, the more they know about you.
When you're a balloon company and we have a regulation there in the airspace, just like some people forget, like, somebody regulates the ground all the way to outer space.
Speaker A:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker B:It's like that is owned by typically someone on the ground and controlled by them, and they're monitoring it, and it's a matter of national security.
Speaker A:Yeah, yeah. And that's everything from flying planes. There's class A and B and C and D and G and unrestricted and et cetera, et cetera.
And there's this whole upside down layer cake around airports. And if you're a pilot, you've. You've dealt with that a bunch. If you're not, it can seem like, well, it's all just air. Like, who cares, right.
It's actually pretty restricted.
Speaker B:And the FAA was like built around aircraft, airplanes. And so the rules are kind of weird for balloons too and like a little outdated. So that's why pico balloon is the fun thing right now.
I just think it's like a renaissance of.
Speaker A:Cause it seems to me that I just found it, but I can't imagine a ton of other people have found it. But you're thinking from what you're seeing being in that community that there are a lot of people finding and getting into pico balloons now.
Speaker B:Yeah, just my LinkedIn feed, like I follow lots of topics and companies and things like that. Right. And seeing what everybody's posting about, there is more going to these smaller now it's always this game in balloons.
Smaller is lighter, lighter is less complex. That means you have less visibility to what's happening in real time. And you have a limited. Your product often is data collection.
And so whatever you're flying is also limited in that sense. Stuff's getting really smaller. So like it's getting easier and easier. But I think that the.
When you don't have all of those sensors, it changes your analysis and I think like also coordinating with the rest of air traffic.
Speaker A:Interesting.
Speaker B:And you know, we're not quite sure what we're going to uncover. I think in that space, that's my crystal ball.
Speaker A:Yeah. Because we had talked about it.
Because I was thinking this PCB that I'm designing has got way more sensors on it than anything I've seen the rest of the pico community firing off. So it's like, oh, this thing is people.
Speaker B:I'm like a quality, reliability person through and through. And like put a sensor. Tell me, did you measure it? Did you look? Did you like, how do you know that? Oh, I did a math model. Like.
Speaker A:You'Re not trusting the math. Huh?
Speaker B:So I do trust math when I can ground it in real things. I also have seen people not trust their own math and then like reality slaps them too.
Speaker A:So is there a baseline set of data streams or sensors that you would put on any balloon and you'd basically like, you'd basically say, I wouldn't launch a balloon without These things.
Speaker B:Yeah. I would say that you have to know your pressure altitude, not just gps.
Speaker A:Okay.
Speaker B:Ambient pressure. Right. And then you have to know your temperature. I think your ambient pressure temperature is super important.
The delta, depending on your film, how clear or how opaque your film is and its properties in absorption that like emissivity equation is dependent on temperature. And so like, if you know, if you ha. If you can also dangle one inside your balloon, that's ideal for the. Like.
If I can just be a selfish balloon person. I want one in the balloon. I want one outside the balloon. I want a pressure barb that's doing delta pressure inside, outside.
And I want a gyro on the balloon accelerometer. Like, I want to know what happened and maybe in two places on the balloon. Like, if I could. That's my.
Speaker A:Why in two places?
Speaker B:Redundancy. Because balloons are floppy and if you. I would put one on the top and one on the bottom.
And then you understand the dynamics of what happened in between sometimes.
Speaker A:Okay. I mean, I'm not literally, as we have this conversation, but certainly professionally designing this PCB to have these sensors.
I hadn't thought about putting stuff inside the balloon until pretty recently.
Speaker B:You can put gyro on the payload if it's really close to the bottom of the balloon.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker B:It's the same. Same.
Speaker A:So for the pico folks that I've read about, they're just running hf, so it means they have really long antennas. And typically it's is way lower than the balloon, 20ft or 10ft or whatever it is.
One of the things that I'm looking at doing is doing all this on Lora and Lorawan so 9, 15. So like, basically it can sit right under the balloon. There's no antenna length requirement.
Speaker B:And for simplification, like simple, simple pico style, you don't have capacity to move it outside. Soon as you move it outside of your payload, gondola, whatever you want to call it, you have to run some kind of comms up the balloon.
Speaker A:So that was the thing I was thinking about the other day is if I put something inside the balloon, A, how do I get it in there? B, how do I attach it into the balloon? And C, how does it connect to the board, which is what has the radio on it. So it's like this wire has to.
In my mind, a wire has to go through a seal. It has to seal around that wire to the pressure requirement.
Speaker B:And that doesn't seem like wires usually the option. I think it has something to do with like, you know, you don't want to power something that's transmitting remotely. Like a.
You know, if you were to connect the top of the balloon to the bottom of the balloon wirelessly, it would cost a lot of power and not be really that reliable. So they run a wire up the side of bigger balloons.
Speaker A:Yeah, yeah. But that doesn't get it inside. I'm thinking, and this is just me brainstorming so you can be like, hey, dude, you're an idiot.
But I'm thinking just if I get a regular insulated wire and put it in the seal and then heat seal. Sorry, put it through the bottom of the balloon where you inflate it, the inflation tube, and then heat seal it, that everything will melt together.
But there's no, there's no guarantee.
Speaker B:No. Things only melt together that are like molecularly similar.
Speaker A:Huh.
Speaker B:At a consistent temperature. And it's also pressure. It's like Heat sealing has many dimensions. Typically when hardware is integrated to a balloon, there's some kind of a port.
So you're putting like a flange on it somehow. A port.
Speaker A:Oh, interesting. So you're not. I mean, I can't. I'm just thinking the Pico folks are doing this, are like, God, this guy's an idiot.
He hasn't thought through everything. But I'm thinking, like, I'm. I'm the first person ever think of this. How would you put a flange or a port in one of these party balloons?
Or do you just face the fact that if you're going to get into this, you're going to have to design like a custom science balloon and not use the super simple inflation tube that these party balloons use.
Speaker B:You can do whatever you want for your goal. Right.
Speaker A:I'm going to get after it and just like test all this stuff.
Speaker B:Yeah.
If there is a reliability target on their balloons, if you can drop a third of your balloons and that still reach your goal, don't worry about anything. Any of this. Just go fly your balloons.
Speaker A:Yeah, yeah. Just go fire them off.
Speaker B:And that's. But if you're trying to get em to do something more and they're not, then you gotta consider some of these things.
Speaker A:Yeah.
That those stats are at stats medioscientific.com, which I'll put a link for anyone who wants to see those stats where it's like, all right, how did you get that? But that 30% failure rate on Pico balloons in the first week seems like it's pretty close to accurate.
I Think there's always with the ham community, it's, it's a bunch of like, I don't know, super nerdy dudes. You'll never get full agreement on stuff, but the 30% is, is close enough. But I don't like that 30% fail in the first seven days. Like, I.
That seems to be too much.
Speaker B:Especially if you're like, designating balloons for particular experiments.
It gets annoying because a lot of times you're like, okay, we're gonna send these five today and they're gonna go do this scan of this area or collect this. You know what I mean? Or we're testing something on the payload, so they need to be stable enough during this time.
And so now that other experiment is fooeyed by your balloon failure.
Speaker A:Yeah. And you're like, okay, I was gonna send five, but at a 30% failure rate, now I've gotta send correct 15 or whatever it is.
Speaker B:Yeah.
So, like, if you can be more confident in what your balloon's doing, or if you can adapt your operations to, like, be soft on, softer on balloons than what they're designed for, you'll get maybe more out of it if you can tolerate it.
Speaker A:Interesting. So there's the basics of putting sensors inside and outside the balloons. That makes sense to me.
Is there anything else that you think of when you're first talking to maybe a new client, where you are doing, like, your investigatory questions on, like, where are you in the process that would be helpful for someone to hear about?
Speaker B:I usually want to know kind of like the mission objectives. Like, I'm a pm, so I'm grounded in what's. What's trying to do here. What are you trying to do? Yeah, like, what matters to you?
And then I also like, I like to, you know, it's about people for me too. So why'd you start this and kind of like, tell me a little bit about, like, your, your big hits.
Like, I can go read it in press, but you tell me, because I just like to know what kind of engineer they are or what kind of thinker they are, if they're not an engineer. Usually one of the founders in balloon companies is a balloon person, but, like, not always, but often.
I would probably also like, I want your manufacturing process. How do you make them? What are they made out of? Show me your specs, that kind of stuff. I'm just going to do, like, checks on.
What are you expecting it to do? What are all the, like, pressures and stresses and whatever. So, like, those are the initial intake questions.
And then it becomes what kind of time do you have? Is there like a. Oh, we have a demonstration for an investor by this time at whatever.
Because like that can often drive how they're looking at decisions. Because I'm not there to tell you exactly what to do. I'm there to tell you how to make your system better.
But that falls under the umbrella of things I know need to be done and I want to do for my company. Right. Consultant role. And so like I have to ask some of those questions too to make sure that I can help you. Right.
Because it's the type of help I offer which is like I can go for a full immersive or we can do a project like I have this one thing, I'm really looking for this one property. Or I know I have this one failure mode. And then I have like general overviews.
People just like can you just come make a 10 page report on everything you see and that you would do differently? Right. So like it just depends on really what they want and what stage they're at. Are you scrappy?
I have some of those, I have more developed clients that like, no, they have a specific problem statement. They have the budget for that problem statement. They're going to do this thing. Right. Just depends.
Speaker A:And is there a favorite, I guess like work mode that you have? Would you rather embed or would you rather just like call in once a week for an hour? Does it matter to you?
Speaker B:I think I like hybrid. I think that I use my in between time for you even when you're not paying me.
When I'm working a client, like my brain is working problems all the time. I'm charging you for my lifetime and my, like I sat down and wrote you a document.
I sat down and like did supply chain research for you or I called vendors, whatever. But I, I like to do programs that are sort of like let's talk regularly, let's be in person when we can.
Depending on your, you know, geography where you're located and because I think they have so many other things they're often working on too that like consultants see to the company side, to the customer side can be overwhelming. Could be like the one reason you don't bring somebody in.
Speaker A:Yeah, they just tell you too much stuff.
Speaker B:I can't right now. I can't. We have, you know, like, and so I don't work that way. I like to program manage my time and your time so we can both leave happy.
Because I'm happy when you're happy and you want Me back.
Speaker A:Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, there can't be that many balloon consultants. Does it seem like it's a super competitive space to you?
Are there other folks out there where you're like, oh, yeah, I go up against.
Speaker B:I did like a business, like, ritual class. It was kind of like half woo woo half, but it's about business. It was about, like building my company and customer avatar type stuff. Right.
You asked a lot of these questions, like, what? Hmm. I don't think there's competition. I think I could probably name people that I could phone call that might get into a space.
But a lot of times I'm calling my, like, balloon expert friends to ask a question because I'm like, you know, no, I don't think a lot of people are doing it the way I'm doing it right now that I'm aware of. I think people are embedded. I like the floater because I get to have interesting different problems all the time.
And I get frustrated in a company when I can't get things done faster. So by diversifying my time across lots of companies, people need time to absorb information. I'm coming in with lots of information.
And so if I'm not okay, and next, let's go. You know that I think it's better for me to spread across different clients, do a bunch.
Speaker A:Is there a physical location in the world that you would say is like ground zero for ballooning? Is it this Wallops field place or is it like somewhere else?
Speaker B:I mean, that's a place where lots of people visit. It's definitely like a hotspot on the map. But they don't. They don't all start there. Like, the Wallops is like a facility like the Colombian.
Whatever, Whatever.
Speaker A:Okay.
Speaker B:There's a NASA facility that people can rent for balloon things because they have a lot of, like, launch equipment, specialty test equipment, all kinds of stuff. They do like stem summer camp stuff there. Like, it's really busy, but I don't think they're like, located a center epicenter.
I mean, Silicon Valley has lots of stuff just because it's the Silicon Valley. Lots of things incubate here and then go other places. But balloons, there's several in the Midwest. The US Is a pretty strong contender.
There are lots of companies in France. I think France is a notable other balloon center, especially if you have history in mind.
And while I don't know a lot about them, they have a great reputation in Japan for their balloons.
Speaker A:Interesting, huh? So the U.S. france and Japan. And funnily enough, the guy I think.
Speaker B:The Germans, I have to mention that. I mean, they're good at engineering in general. Like, there are a handful, I should mention, that are in the top lists.
Speaker A:Huh. I hadn't thought of it. On an international stage, as far as who's.
Who's the most technologically advanced, it seems like it's kind of shaken out to the normal.
Speaker B:The usual, I would say airships too, like France and Israel. There's a couple of big companies that develop things that are also doing airships.
Speaker A:Interesting. I mean, Israelis you can never discount because they're just super fucking crafty usb.
Speaker B:And you use it in defense. They probably are working on it.
Speaker A:Yeah, yeah, yeah. Huh. Interesting. And then is there in general, in.
Speaker B:The Middle East, I guess, like Serbia. I know there's a couple of them. There's a presence there. I'm sure Russia is making balloons and China.
Speaker A:I mean, China's making them and flying them over America.
Speaker B:They are. I don't know anything about that. It's. It didn't look that complicated.
Speaker A:It was a funny thing. And then, of course, apparently the US Air Force is shooting down pico balloons over Canada occasionally.
Speaker B:Yeah, that's the, like, what I mean by. It's like not as instrumented. And so it has a hard time interfacing with the traditional methods of air traffic control.
Speaker A:Yep.
Speaker B:Right. Like, and, and space, like homeland security.
Speaker A:Yeah. If you, if the US Government came to you now and said, hey, we think you should help us write regulations, it may not be what you want to do.
I'm not a huge fan of them.
But are there any things that you think of now that you're like, hey, we should do it this way if it's going to come and accept that it's going to come. This is how these things should be regulated. Or these are important aspects.
Speaker B:Hmm. I think people are going to hate me.
I think that some of these pico balloons and like, if we're going to fly quantities, like at the increasing scale that I'm watching other tech, like AI develop in the physical space. I'm talking like data centers and how quickly all this stuff.
If we're going to ramp up balloons that way, you probably should consider some kind of like an at least generalized notam that's like, for a quantity of balloons.
Speaker A:And notam is notice to airmen. It's the thing that you fire off before you're going to launch a balloon.
Speaker B:Or anything, or at least be registered as somebody who like, regularly launches. I know if you want to be amateur that, like, I feel that, like, I love that the science comes out of amateur ballooning, too. Um, it's a big.
It's a strong part of it. And so, like, get a registered balloon, a sounding balloon that comes from the company that has the certification. Like, do it via the source. Right.
But I'm gonna.
Speaker A:I'm gonna cut this part out. There should be no regulation. No, no, it's stated.
Speaker B:I don't know, like, they. Or we have to have some minimum requirement for visibility.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker B:Radar visibility.
Speaker A:Or maybe you just require. Yeah. Radar visibility that, like, the thing can be seen.
Speaker B:Yeah. And it can be done with, like, a little, like, flying. A little cage thing that's visible when you scan, Right.
Speaker A:Yep. Just like on a sailboat. You put up a little. A little thing at the top of the mast, and that helps. A radar reflector. That helps.
Speaker B:Right, right, right. A radar reflector. That's right. That's the word I was looking for. Yeah.
Speaker A:Although I will say, from my experience sailing, either the big ships don't look for those at all, which is what I suspect, having been on the big ships and knowing what they care about and don't care about, or they just don't work that well.
Speaker B:Yeah. We played with radar reflectors on and off. Just like, little. Little boxes that had, like, cubes of. We were putting Mylar on them.
Speaker A:Yep.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker A:No, the ones. The ones I've used have sucked. And I. I know.
Speaker B:I don't know if there's a good solution. That's why I hesitate on the regulation. Like, it's probably.
It would be more cumbersome at this stage than safety related, but I'm always gonna bias, like, safety.
Speaker A:Yeah. Although so far, only one plane has hit a pico balloon, and it just cracked the windshield, and that was it. And they landed it safely.
No loss of life, which is. No one's excited about that. But it also seems that probably a lot of people are launching, and if that's the hit rate, that's kind of not so bad.
Speaker B:Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Okay.
Speaker A:And then maybe there's some piece there. Although it's restricted on the pico side by the. The mass that these things can pull up into the sky.
Speaker B:That's always mass. Mass. Mass.
Speaker A:Yeah. Is you. You would like to say, like, oh, yeah, put a. Whatever. A transponder on it.
But then you have to have power for that thing and what happens when it goes down and et cetera, et cetera. So maybe there's something in the. In the material science side where you say, like, hey, every balloon has to have this reflectivity to it.
And so it's just built in the balloon itself.
Speaker B:Yeah. Reflectivity would be better. Yeah. A lot of balloon people are fighting absorptivity. Right. Like so reflectivity is ideal.
Speaker A:I don't understand that from the uv.
Speaker B:Maybe it's different if it's radio, but.
Speaker A:Interesting. So they're trying to make. Basically trying to make the balloon envelope tougher and they're doing that by reflecting the light that hits it.
Is that right?
Speaker B:Well, it's thermal management.
Speaker A:Okay.
Speaker B:You don't want to get hot because.
Speaker A:If you do, it expands past the bursting point or whatever.
Speaker B:Correct.
Speaker A:Okay.
Speaker B:You overpressure your balloon and your materials become weaker at those temperatures.
Speaker A:So this is something I don't. That's.
Speaker B:It's their thermoplastics.
Speaker A:Yeah. Thermo and plastic.
The pico balloon talks, the community talks about this where when you inflate a balloon with hydrogen at sea level or at the ground, it will lose gas pretty quickly. But once it gets up to the altitude it's supposed to be at, it'll hold it for a year. Which I always thought was super interesting.
I would have thought it would have been the other way around because I think of the material like stretching and basically the holes of the material getting bigger the higher it goes.
Speaker B:But I guess you have thermal contraction first.
Speaker A:That's not right. Okay. And the contraction is what?
Speaker B:The contraction first, usually prior to pressurization or like kind of at the same time. It really depends on what time of day and where you're flying and how much you absorb.
Speaker A:Interesting. And I wonder if there's some of the stats I can run to see when balloon launches were versus failure rate.
Like if you have more failures if you launch in the morning versus at night.
Speaker B:Yes. Some people especially avoid coming to flow altitude as you are increasing in solar super temperature.
Speaker A:Right. So it sounds like the best. And here in San Diego, for the most part, the weather is.
Is conducive for this, is that it would be best to launch it at whatever like early evening.
Speaker B:Dark 30 we used to call it.
Speaker A:Yeah, yeah, yeah, let's. That seems to be later than I'd like as far as, oh, dark 30. But like. Yeah, once.
Once the sun goes down, that's when you should start launching in order to keep your kind of safety margin the best. Depending on how long it takes to get to altitude, which it can't be that long. Right.
Speaker B:Uh, usually it's within an hour.
Speaker A:Okay.
Speaker B:Can be 30 minutes. It really. That's a rate you Control when you choose your free lift. And that rate is directly tied to how much strength you have in your system. Right.
You can, you can take the same system and pressurize it slowly and it survives and pressurize it quickly and it pops.
Speaker A:Is there anyone sewing balloons still or is it all plastics? It's all.
Speaker B:Airships are not even sewn anymore and that's fabric. So people are welding with all kinds of things and they're like complicated layups of adhesives and tapes and things.
But usually it's temperature, ultrasonic, something like that.
Speaker A:And you had told me that because I was like, oh, I'm going to get this ultrasonic sewing machine from Juki. And you're like, dude, ultrasonics don't work. Like, save yourself 20 grand.
Speaker B:Well, for thin plastic films like pico balloons, it just disturbs the molecules way too much that the strength of the bond is not even important at that point because you've destroyed the edge of the bond to the parent material.
Speaker A:And that was the problem. I mean it. I really like the way those things look when they sew. But if it doesn't work, it doesn't work.
I did see it at this MDNM, MDN, MD&M show that they had a laser welder and I thought that looked pretty cool.
Speaker B:And I thought you were gonna say you went to the MDMA show.
Speaker A:I did not go to the. No, I have. I did not go to the mdma. No, there's medical devices manufacturing. Madam, you assume too much.
Speaker B:I'm sassy.
Speaker A:Yeah, the laser welding thing looked pretty cool. Is that something you see being used all the time or is it.
Speaker B:I have seen laser welding. Yeah. And you can laser weld. It's like it's really hot for the thin balloon plastic.
But if you're trying to bond a thin thing to like a hardware piece. I've seen that work.
Speaker A:Well, interesting. I'm going to.
When we get off the call here, I'm going to go into the garage and see if I can weld together wire and the seal and see if it holds in my little vacuum.
Speaker B:It's a way maybe to install a leak proof port to another material.
Speaker A:Yeah, I mean, it's fun to have all this stuff in the garage because then I can just go test and be like, yeah, that, that works. Or it doesn't work. And typically it doesn't.
Speaker B:Yeah, I gotta check out your workshop one of these days.
Speaker A:Come on down, come on down. I've got a. I've got this other sled project that I'm gonna have the neighborhood come by. Cause it's this exercise sled I've been building.
We finally got. So I pulled an alternator off an old Lexus. It's a Toyota alternator and it's mounted on this sled. And there's a two stage pulley system.
So when you push it, it turns the back wheels and it goes through this pulley system and spins the alternator. And my buddy and I have been. He has been fabricating it as I supervise.
But I just got it set up so that you can put a multimeter on it and read the voltage coming off of the alternator.
And so I'm gonna have the whole neighborhood come by and it's like, hey, come and check this thing out and give it a push and see what voltage you can push before we even get to the next part, which is changing that voltage. So you have different resistance.
Speaker B:Voltage generation competition.
Speaker A:Yeah, 3.5 is. Is the highest we've gotten it. But no one's. Neither my buddy Adrian nor I have been that serious about it.
Speaker B:Is it then. So like the faster you push, it's going to go up. Okay. But it's really heavy. It's like a football sled.
Speaker A:Yeah, yeah. It's about a hundred and some pounds. I just.
Yeah, I'll put videos on LinkedIn and there's stuff up on YouTube of us pushing this thing, but it's all metal. It's fucking rad.
Speaker B:And you got it back from the dump. You did tell me about it getting.
Speaker A:I lost. No, I lost. I lost the one that went to the dump. This is the V2. So.
Speaker B:Okay.
Speaker A:Yeah, but nothing to do with balloons. But it is also cluttering up my workshop along with my sewing machine and various other. Various and Sunday. Other things.
Speaker B:I know you're sitting on a sewing machine. There's one back there and there's one right there.
Speaker A:So is there anything that you do you like. Do you see yourself doing balloons as a hobby or is this something where you do balloon work and then you're done and you go whatever.
Hang out with your kids or dog or whatever it is.
Speaker B:Yeah, yeah. I have two kids and two cats and a dog. So I do hang out with them. And a husband, he's, you know, low on the totem pole.
Speaker A:A co. Creator of the children he gets to access.
Speaker B:Yeah, let's see. No, but I. I run another business. I run a textile business that's like upcycling. I make old things new.
So mostly sewing, but a little Bit of woodworking and like a little bit of interiors with people.
I have a couple of interior design clients right now, so, yeah, I really do like being able to float between, like, different activities and get paid for different things.
Speaker A:Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's. It's a fun, fun way to go through life is you get to explore a bunch of stuff.
And I think that also ends up being something where if you have any kind of inventive personality, you can take something you learn in sewing and put it into ballooning and something you learn at whatever design.
Speaker B:Yeah, I mean, the sewing stuff keeps my hands loose. Right. So when I go and then work on balloons, I'm used to moving material that's slippery and stretchy and stuff all the time.
Speaker A:Yeah. And there's.
Is there anything where folks are sewing a seam and then heat sealing it and they're sewing it for strength and heat sealing it for like gas impermeability or. That just doesn't make sense.
Speaker B:It doesn't make sense because each poke starts a notch and a notch in materials can tear. Right. And so like we do notch testing in plastics, right. Where you do a little pants and you rip one pants one the other way. Like on the Instron.
Right. So. And those things are not cheap. No. Instron.
Speaker A:Yeah, I was looking at.
Speaker B:I might be able to hook you up. Let me know if you're. I have some. I know someone who might be looking to sell them.
Speaker A:I am in the market, so yeah, I was looking at those, but they were like, those things are crazy because I think it's just for the frame. The frame can be like 300 bucks. And it's like you need some computer and then you need the next thing.
And by the time you get something to your door, it's no less than 2,500. And you're probably spending like 10 grand if you want something.
Speaker B:All right, I'll give you this cheat code for balloons. When you want to test film properties, seal properties all the way back. Since you got the cold box, you do a cylinder test.
It means to make a cylinder of your plastic, you put two end caps on the end and a couple like a pressure barb for reading and a pressure barb for inflating. And it's like hose clamps around two end caps.
Speaker A:Oh, that's it.
Speaker B:That's the old school cylinder method. And it gets you, you know, 80% or whatever. It gets you close. It gets you the temperature simulation.
You have to be careful with like scaling your size and the stresses. Right. Do a little Bit of math first. Make sure you made it the size that you want and that you can interpret and translate.
Like the number I get on the cylinder has to go through a translation to tell me what my in flight balloon will tolerate.
Speaker A:Yep. Which is what AI is incredibly useful for now.
Speaker B:So useful for all of these like calculations.
Speaker A:It's insane. I, I got this party balloon thing in from China and I just went to AI and I'm like, hey, can you help me figure out what this plastic is?
And it took me through like 30 tests. Like oh, if you poke a hot needle through, what happens if you hold flame next to what happens if you te it?
What does it look like if you get it really cold, what does it look like?
Because we have like all of these things and all of a sudden it's like oh, this thing is probably, I think it's like pet with the blah blah, blah, orientated strand, et cetera.
Speaker B:I will say like from my experience the sometimes the level of complexity with some of the more difficult problems, like it's not going to look at the layers of like a complex composite and do a great job. But that's always been hard. Right. Or it's not gonna like but it's getting you the gross geometries. If you have a monofilm, great for you.
Like you can use that usually pretty reliably.
Speaker A:Huh. And do you think that monofilms are useful? It seems like everything that I've seen is some kind of. Was it multi layer something or other.
Speaker B:Or do you think is a big like decision web of trade offs?
Speaker A:Okay.
Speaker B:In the materials game like you usually add composites for strength.
Occasionally you want to layer in there for some kind of a optical or thermal property and then you want sealability which LL DPE is your favorite friend. Like it is probably the easier one to seal. That also is good at cold. Uh, ll dpe, not just linear low density polyethylene.
Speaker A:Okay. Yeah, I've got some LDPE that we use for another business I have. But not ll.
Speaker B:Linear just has a stiffness factor that's a bit stronger.
Speaker A:Okay, I'll go talk to our, our packaging guys for the dessert shop. Be like hey, you got any of this, this stuff? Gimme some of your fancy shit.
Speaker B:Uh, I might someone who has film too. So let's talk.
Speaker A:Yeah. And I am, I am, I've got to be, I don't have to be transparent about this, but I think it's important.
Like I'm trying to get you to work with this super cool. I think program to go after building more domestic balloon kind of manufacturing capability in the U.S. i think that would be super cool to do.
Speaker B:I think there's lots of ways I can help.
Speaker A:Yeah. Ripping. Well, Pamela, thanks a ton for your time. I appreciate you carving out an hour, plus the 20 minutes we spent on my audio issues.
Speaker B:So troubleshooting. I have gremlins. I told you, I take full responsibility for any of these situations. Situation.
Speaker A:I don't know how they got into my computer, though.
Speaker B:Magic.
Speaker A:Super cool. Thanks. Coming on. Where can people find you for folks who are listening?
Speaker B:Hey, yeah. So I launched my website, dandelion balloons.com dandelionballoons.com okay, cool.
Speaker A:We'll put a link to that in the show notes. All the rest of it.
Speaker B:Yeah. When this goes out, dandelionballoons with an.
Speaker A:S. Dot com with an S. Not that. Or you can find me balloon people.
Speaker B:I know. Put an S on there. There's lots of balloons. Us at Dandelion Balloons on Instagram.
Speaker A:Okay. And you've got some cool posts there already starting.
Speaker B:Like, do a little education piece there. A little more of this maybe.
Speaker A:Yeah. Yeah, I like it. Well, thanks for kicking it off of me.
Speaker B:Thanks.
Speaker A:All right.
