[petarb]

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?

[wrs]

Orbit? It’s a balloon gondola.

[imglorp]

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

[pc86]

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

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Average-wind-speeds-in-m...