In an upset of astronomical proportions, the Super Pressure Balloon (SPB) project soared through a field of 64 entries to be voted NASA's "Greatest Mission of All Time," in the space program's Mission Madness tournament, modeled on NCAA "March Madness." In the final round, completed late Tuesday, SPB beat out the venerable and groundbreaking SOHO (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory) by a 54-46% margin.

SPB employs new technology to add longevity and stability to balloon-borne scientific missions (see my description below, based on a discussion with SPB's technical director). It provides important cost savings in lofting payloads to the edge of space that otherwise would have to be borne by orbiting satellites. But I'm flabbergasted that this development-stage project was voted NASA's greatest mission ever, particularly as I have yet to meet anyone outside of NASA who had even heard of SPB before this contest.

In each round, SPB easily racked up the highest vote totals of any mission in the round, so a lot of people must have voted for it while ignoring the rest of the contests in each round. In the first round, it knocked out the intrepid Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity. It advanced while heavyweights like Apollo 11, the Voyager, Cassini, Viking, and Pioneer planetary missions, the Hubble Space Telescope and other well-known missions were left in the cosmic dust.

Mission Madness is a contest, devised and sponsored by NASA, designed along the lines of the NCAA March Madness basketball tournament and featuring a bracket of 64 NASA missions, past, present, and future. As the missions couldn't "play" each other, the winners of each pairing were decided by voting, open to the public, from NASA's Mission Madness Web site.

Anyone could vote as often as they wanted; the only restriction was that the voting not be automated. (You had to answer a question or enter some text to verify your vote.) Current missions, with a support staff and active following, are at an advantage; all the missions that made it to the Final Four are either in process or under development. Either SPB has an extensive stealth following, or it's a darling among NASA employees, or benefited from an unusually large and obsessive cadre of voters casting their votes for SPB over and over again. (That's perfectly within the rules, and Web sites of missions involved in the competition exhorted their visitors to vote for their project.)

Last week, Debbie Fairbrother, chief technologist for NASA's balloon program, gave me an overview of the SPB project. Unlike NASA's workhorse zero-pressure high-altitude balloons, which vent gas (helium) during the daytime when heated to full inflation, and contract at night when the gas cools (sometimes causing the balloons to descend 10,000 feet or more at night), super pressure balloons are fully pressurized, insulating them from the vagaries of temperature, providing greater stability and the potential for much longer flights. A January test flight launched from Antarctica, in which the balloon maintained an altitude of 110,000 feet, stayed aloft for 54 days, compared with a few weeks for a standard zero-pressure balloon. The pumpkin-shaped balloon uses a lightweight polyethylene film as its skin.

When development is complete, super pressure balloons will be able to carry payloads of several tons above 99 percent of Earth's atmosphere on missions of 100 days or more. NASA's current high-altitude balloons carry instruments such as telescopes and cosmic-ray detectors (and much more economically than an orbiting satellite mission); the payloads can be retrieved and reused once the flight is over. Earth scientists are also expressing interest in the use of super pressure balloons. Lastly, they could also potentially be used in missions to other planets, where they would stay aloft for an extended period in the planet's upper atmosphere.

This is all impressive stuff, and I'm glad that Mission Madness brought the Super Pressure Balloon (as well as some other underexposed projects) some well-deserved attention. A contest like this is, or should be, all in good fun. But is SPB really the greatest NASA mission of all time? Of course, I'd expect the mission personnel and support staff to support their own, but I have to wonder what planet most of the people who ran up Super Pressure Balloon's vote totals round after round are living on.