User blog comment:Riley Heligo/Seriously EA?/@comment-4118072-20120217142609/@comment-4800118-20120217145532

Weather balloons don't go into orbit period. It is a ballistic trajectory, up and down. Nowhere near enough velocity to be orbital. Re-entry flames that you are thinking of require serious supersonic speeds. These will just float down. I don't have details on the mechanism being used by EA here, but a second chute that deploys after being triggered by a barometric sensor could make the landing be quite soft and leave little concern for damage to the disc and container. The real issue is if the box is caught up in some trees somewhere, or on roof of a building, or is sucked up by passing by jet. But you need clearence for sending anything up to this height. You will notice the landing zone will be very little downrange, since the balloon only provides lift with zero local horizon velocity, and even then, only provide lift on the way up. When it comes down, it is going straight down, and starting its accelration at essentially zero.

When you think of re-entry flames, like in the Apollo Capsules, the Soyuz, it is because they were traveling very fast and coming into the air at a steep angle. Apollo returned from the moon traveling at excess of 35 thousand feet per second. The Space Shuttle's profile is what caused the ionization effects on its re-entry. It hits the atmosphere at about 25 thousand feet per second (around Mach 26), and gently comes home. These weather ballons will hit the atmosphere nowhere near those speeds.