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Lenny: Yes. Water, usually. Those big water bags with taps on, ideally, so it’s easy to drain out.
Eva: And how do you come back down to earth? Lenny: Well, that’s actually a reason for having
the balloons tied on individually. You can release them, one by one, which allows you to reduce
the amount of lift incrementally.
Eva: I see. Because I was thinking, surely it would be easier to just have all the balloons
contained within a big net, to make it faster to assemble. You know, rather than spending ages
tying every single balloon on individually. But then if you did that, you wouldn't be able to
release them, would you?
Lenny: No. That's true.
Eva: You could burst them, somehow, I suppose. Lenny: Yeah. I mean, there are obviously
various ways of doing it...

Read the conversation and summarise what they say about the following issues.
1 assembly time
2 how plastic cable ties are used
3 a tree structure
4 how water bags are used
5 the advantage of tying each individual balloon
6 the problem of using a net to contain the balloons

In pairs, discuss ways of overcoming the problems mentioned in the conversation. How
could cluster ballooning be made more accessible to a mass market? What other
equipment/assemblies could be used?

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